Álvaro Rivas García turns 31 on February 26, the same day that marks the 31st anniversary of the death of his mother, the journalist Sara García Calle. Sara died of a pulmonary embolism hours after the cesarean section that was performed in a Madrid hospital to bring her first baby into the world. He was 27 years old, he worked in THE COUNTRY and his death left the boy’s father, journalist Álvaro Rivas, a widower, and all his colleagues and friends devastated. Three decades later, Sara and Álvaro’s son is a celebrity. Singer and lyricist of the group Alcalá Norte, the title of his song canyon life It has become a catchphrase to refer to the supposed good life. We spoke at the bar, across from the group’s homonymous shopping center, where its members gathered as youngsters to watch life go by. One of those neighborhood joints, neighborhood, with menu of the day, pinchos at the bar and retirees spending the morning where, in a quarter of an hour, we hear Pedro Sánchez and Isabel Díaz Ayuso called “son of a bitch”, successively, in a silent shot on TV. We decided to go to a quieter place. It’s time for vermouth, but Rivas asks for a glass of water.
What is it like celebrating your birthday on the same day your mother died?
Well, the truth is that my family did a very good job so that I would not develop traumas of that type. I remember seeing game of throneswhere the dwarf was called a murderer for something similar, and to think that I was not like him. Then I have seen and read representation in art of motherless children in childbirth as people with a guilt complex for having killed their mother and relatives looking at them with resentment, considering them as the cause of their death. That has never happened to me. I have never had regrets.
How and when did they tell you what happened that day?
They supposedly did it, but I don’t remember. I remember, at the same time, knowing it and having called another woman, my father’s new partner, mother, since I was three years old. In my head all of that has always existed at the same time. As if he had always known. I guess it’s a credit to my biological mother’s family. My father would do what he could, but they did their part to make sure everything went well.
Your theme canyon life It has become a wild card to brag about or blame someone for their quality of life. How does it stay?
It makes me very excited, honestly. The best thing is that the phrase is not even mine, Barbosa, the group’s drummer, rescued it from a 1931 newspaper where it was attributed to someone who had won the lottery. That song is a tribute to that man and a gift to my drummer. That lyric was special from the beginning. It’s cool that everyone listens to it and makes their own reading. The other day I read that someone gave their cat “the cannon life” and I found it very funny. I like it. They are all valid.
The journalist Analía Plaza has titled a book in this way in which he attributes that life to the boomersas opposed to that of millennials. How did it sit with the group?
Well, the first reaction was anger, because we received an email from its editor, a real piranha, with language more typical of mafias, in which she informed us of the matter. On the one hand, he said that the title was a coincidence, that he had found it researching his move from the boomersand on the other hand, in the first chapter he cited Barbosa. I talked to my publisher and they said I could use the phrase, so we sent them a message saying: do whatever you want, good luck.
Do you, millennial, live worse than your father? boomer?
Let’s see, my father, at 30, was a widower, unemployed and with me as a newborn, that’s not the best life. Surely, my father saw it as a huge shame to have a 20-year mortgage with a very high interest rate that he had to pay alone. Now, that seems like a privilege. The inaccessibility of housing has changed everything. At 30 I live, and very well, from writing songs. I tell people I smoke joint, and everyone doesn’t care. So naturally I live better than him. But mine is an abnormality. When I look at my colleagues and their elders, both the bourgeois and the neighborhood ones, their life is not like mine.
This neighborhood is also on the border. On one side of the shopping center Alcala North There are the posh people of Arturo Soria and, on the other, the Latin migrants of García Noblejas.
Yes, and, in that sense, my father fulfilled his dream of crossing the river and buying a small apartment on the good side, with a mortgage that he knew he would be able to pay, and that he now rents to me. Ask journalists fresh out of college if they can get into mortgages in the neighborhood their parents dreamed of living in. In that sense, I am privileged. Plus, I’m lucky that my job is so fun that it’s the one my dad would have liked to have when he was young. But it is also true that my father, in his twenties, earned the same as he did when he was 40, because there was a change of stage and salaries went down. Nothing is that simple.
His father is a journalist, his mother was also one. Weren’t you tempted by the job?
My uncle Ángel always told me: why don’t you get into that, man, it’s the only place where you’re going to have an outlet? But I never saw him, maybe because I sucked him at home. Then my father dedicated himself to television and more than one would drop out of the race because of everything I have seen in it through his eyes. The truth is that I don’t consume current affairs, because I hurt myself.
Does the news depress you?
Look, I don’t handle calling TV a son of a bitch, as we’ve heard now. It predisposes you to hatred against those who, in other matters, would be in the good. If I consumed parliamentary news, I would be intoxicated. Of course, I allow myself the sin of compulsively consuming sports news. In the end, getting intoxicated with Arbeloa (Real Madrid coach) is easy to put into perspective and you send it off with a few laughs.
Of course, in football there is no more drama than a humiliating defeat.
Well, injuries make for good drama too. Or when a player leaves your team. That hurts too. Cristiano Ronaldo’s departure from Madrid gave rise to two of our songs. And, now, well: Mbappé has been around for a couple of years, when I didn’t think there was going to be a guy scoring me a goal a week to achieve my goals as a Real Madrid player, but it’s still not the same.
It seems to mark you, personally.
Well, of course, Mbappé gives me hope. And I’m sorry that the locker room and Xabi Alonso haven’t gelled. And I am worried about the accounts and I have the feeling that less has been signed than what should be because of the accounts. The other day they recommended me a podcast of gruesome football stories, and, at that current point of the Netflix series that they are now asking me in the group for the lyrics, well, maybe some of that sneaks in. But it doesn’t always happen. On this album there are going to be lyrics that I don’t really like, but the rest do, and they are moving forward, even though they seem like a crime to me.
When do you know you’ve made a good song?
There are times when from the first time you pronounce a lyric, you get a warm feeling that makes your hair stand on end, your skin crawls and you say: okay, this is cool. But, in particular, I am happy and calm when Barbosa says he likes it. Since I’m no expert, I trust your judgment more than anything else.
Barbosa, you and the rest of the group are friends from the neighborhood. Can you continue being that way after the success of your album?
It’s complicated, but we still are, because I notice your support with a delicacy typical of a friend, not a colleague. The three founders were three friends from the neighborhood, but one has already left because he has preferred his life as a doctor in History in Sweden, where he is a figure, something quite reasonable. We have met the others there and now we are a group of partners around something called Alcalá Norte, which is what we all like.
In 2024, appendicitis almost took him away. Did you see the wolf’s ears?
Yeah, that was awesome. I appeared on the cover of EL PAÍS as a sticker next to the bedside thanks to appendicitis, and I found it funny. The two days with the most plays of Alcalá Norte on Spotify were that one, and the one that was published in EL PAÍS that I had recovered from. He has his that one. I was born due to medical negligence with my mother, and I almost beat her, so in hospitals I always fear the worst. It was eight weeks in suspense.
Is that enough to write a song?
Well look, there’s a song about the bar we’re in that was a kind of anesthesia delirium. I woke up from the second operation and asked my wife to put my phone on to record because a song had come out of I don’t know where. I’ve been told I said funny and strange things. But, let’s see, I love getting high in a thousand different ways, and I’m used to that state.
Now they will call him a drug apologist.
Sure, but well, I have studied a lot with Escohotado, the drug philosopher, and I am used to that type of simplifications: Rivas, the joint singer and such. But hey, there have been so many before me and there will continue to be.
Now a water has been ordered.
Yes, yes, but yesterday I smoked a joint, what do I know. I try to keep them away, since they are stronger than me, I try not to have them at home.
He got married at 25, that is also an abnormality at his age.
Well, among my bourgeois friends between 25 and 30 people get married, I imagine that because it is easier for them to have a home together without having to fight so much, or perhaps it is an ideological question, preferably for marriage. I got married during the pandemic so that my wife, who is Brazilian, would have papers as soon as possible. Now you have the passport and everything. And we are going to get married in the Church.
Do you want to be a father?
I do, but she has to be the one to say it’s okay, because I still have to spend a month and a half in another continent on tour for work and I understand that a mother gets dizzy about that with respect to her husband.
Have you been curious to know what your mother was like as a journalist? Have you read or asked about it?
I could have done more. Recently, I went to read a couple of diaries I had. Things about her ex-boyfriends, very funny girl things. The 23-F as told by her, I have been lucky enough to enjoy those things recently. It makes me very happy to read it.
His colleagues at EL PAÍS are extremely saddened by his death. The journalist Alfonso Armada wrote a wonderful obituary. Have you read it?
No, I swear. Send it to me, please. But, look, regarding journalists and my mother, I have to say that the ones who behaved best were the Luca de Tena, who gave me gifts and things like that as a press orphan that I was. In EL PAÍS, since my mother was what would be falsely self-employed today, they could have recognized a certain employment relationship, but they did not do so. To my old man, who just became unemployed, with a newborn child and a widower, a little help would have been nice for my orphanhood. But hey, here you and I are, chatting. Our new album comes out in September and a preview comes out in March, it would be good for us if you played it.
Thank you very much for your trust.
To you, for this opportunity. I know my mother will read the piece with pride wherever she is.
SON OF HIS MOTHER AND HIS FATHER
Álvaro Rivas García (Madrid, 30 years old), son of journalists, and orphan of a mother since birth, was never tempted by journalism. Despite this, his songs in front of the microphone and the lyrics of the group Alcalá Norte, have something of a personal and generational chronicle. After the critical and public success of his first album, canyon lifeand a health crisis that almost cost him his life, this year his second album will be released, the first preview of which, The planet man will be released in March.