For Rozalén (Albacete, 38 years old), “hugs are a superpower.” That is why her new album, Hugare “13 hugs in the form of 13 songs”. A few days ago she presented it to a group of EL PAÍS subscribers at the Teatro Pavón in Madrid. SER journalist Laura Piñero interviewed her and the attendees were able to enjoy a couple of songs live.
Long before dedicating herself to music, María de los Ángeles Rozalén studied Psychology. Perhaps that is why it is so easy for her to reflect the complexity of human emotions in her songs. She has spent the last year and a half away from the stage to focus on composing. “I am a very active person. My father told me that if there was an earthquake, I wouldn’t be at home. Things have to happen to me in order to be able to talk about them, but I had to stop to digest everything properly,” she explained about why she decided to take that break.
On the album he has dared to experiment with styles further away from his musical genre such as Ride me or the collaboration with Carlos Vives, Three days in Cartagenawhere he expresses the influences and emotions of his trip to Colombia for projects related to peace and combines tropical rhythms with those of the Castilian jota. He has also dared to write his own bars and rap with Kase O on My hellsa song dedicated to the haters already the criticisms.
However, as he sings in The friendly face of the world (“Always water your roots, you will know where you want to go if you know where you started from”), Rozalén also dedicates a song to her family and to Balazote, her town. “I owe a lot to Madrid and Albacete, of course, but I really value having grown up in a town. So It is a journey to my childhood full of nostalgia and melancholy. In it I emphasize that what I want is to return to when, not to where, not to here, but to then,” he said.
Claudio Alvarez
Another theme that is very present in the album is love and its variables, whether it is romantic, for oneself, or Rozalén’s idea of love and how she understands relationships: free. She even dedicates a song to her ex-partner: “It is a song in which I tell him that I will take care of him from afar. Life is made up of stages and you don’t stop loving people, you just learn to love in a different way and from another side. Love doesn’t break, it transforms.”
The artist also always shows a great commitment to social causes. Her song The purple door became an anthem against gender violence. The day of the meeting coincided with the return of a tragic weekend in terms of sexist murders and the singer wanted to regret this fact and explained that there was a time when The purple door stopped playing, but now it was heard again more as a form of protest: “That’s bad news. Unfortunately, we’re going to have to keep singing a lot of songs.”
She also couldn’t help but get emotional when she remembered Gaza: “Sometimes it’s hard for me to feel good because of everything that’s happening,” she lamented. That’s why she stressed that in the face of the misfortunes that happen in the world, her album can be a halo of optimism: “In such a hostile world we need hugs.”
Since she started playing on stage, Rozalén has shared them with Bea, her sign language interpreter, to make her music more accessible to everyone. For this reason, she applauded the fact that more and more artists are also betting on this inclusion, and gave Aitana or Taylor Swift as examples.
Once the interview was over, the audience took the floor to ask what advice she would give to all those people who want to dedicate themselves to music (constancy was the answer), or what her dream collaborations would be. She said Residente and the audience asked for one with Amaral. Finally, she said goodbye by performing So accompanied by her guitar, and of course, by Bea.