On November 4, the singer Dani Fernández returned to the stage with a double lump in his throat to present his new album, The packin front of a group of EL PAÍS subscribers. On the one hand, he had just recovered from an ulcer that had made him fear for his voice and, on the other, it seemed unthinkable to him to be working while a few hundred kilometers from the Quique San Francisco theater, where the meeting organized by EL PAÍS+ was taking place. , there were thousands of families affected by dana.
“My body is shaken by all the images we are seeing, but (I am) also very proud of how Spain has gone out of its way to help,” he said in song when journalist Laura Piñero, moderator of the meeting, asked him how he was feeling. Regarding his health, he confessed that he was very scared when he was told the diagnosis, but that he had responded well to the treatment and that his vocal cords, one of his biggest concerns, were intact. “He had knives at his throat,” he described.
Already focused on the launch of his new album, which premiered on October 25, Piñero wanted to delve into the meaning of the title and the double meaning of the term “pack”, one “that we all know” and the other “full of light.” . “We are experiencing these two aspects of my pack (…) we have helped each other, but then we have seen a lot of hatred, we are not having respect and we are looking for culprits,” Fernández explained. However, he admitted feeling excited about the launch: “I am very nervous, with a huge desire to present all these songs.”
As a composer, he puts a lot of himself and his experiences into his songs and that is precisely what makes him vibrate in the days before releases, when the uncertainty of how his work will be received takes over his body. He does not consider it something negative, in fact, he believes that it is that adrenaline that makes him continue dedicating himself to music and what will continue to motivate him in a few years.
However, sometimes it is difficult to differentiate positive nerves from those caused by pressure, and the singer admitted that this has been the moment in his career in which he has felt the most pressure and that since he did not know his own musical identity, he It had been difficult to start the new disk. In the first phases of composition, where the blank page terrified him, he had the type of audience that followed him very much in mind and that conditioned him: “Little by little I realized that I don’t have to be aware of that, but everything It’s a process. When I started making a third album I said ‘Where am I going?’
With or without pressure, the result of that work has been an album with 12 songs, two of them collaborating with Iván Ferreiro and Valeria Castro, where he has mixed various styles, from that “commercial” pop that the industry attributes to him to other rhythms. influenced by their references such as Sexy Zebras or Love of Lesbian. In fact, The main plot It was a last-minute addition that arose when he only had a few days left to deliver the work to the record company (Warner) and that goes outside the musical line shared by other songs. “It’s my protected song from the album,” confessed the singer, who recounted how his wife, the singer and songwriter Yarea, with whom he wrote the lyrics, was disconcerted when she heard the melody and how his label couldn’t quite see it in the album. The Pack.
But his insistence won and now it is that discordant note within the album that is accompanied by other pop songs and rocklike Honey, let your hair down. “Little by little I found myself and each time I have gone more to the extremes, I have not been afraid,” Fernández explained. everything changesfor example, is a “general” song that everyone can like (a term that the singer uses to avoid the connotative adjective “commercial”).
While I am singing there is a person who is with my daughter and I have to give visibility to that.
The Ciudad Real resident forgot to take into account in this balance of disorientation a change that his life has undergone compared to the previous album. Fernández became a first-time father almost a year ago and it took him a while to put this new condition on the table that, without a doubt, has altered everything. “Since I have my daughter, work life has been approached in a different way, life on the road is not so easy,” he admitted. Therefore, in his song Criminal He says “I am a slave to my art, but I don’t want to stray further away.” Conciliation, although it hurts, is possible thanks to his wife: “She allows me to live what I live, if it were not for her efforts, making me continue to grow, I would not be here, I would have to be at home losing many things.” of my work.” Even though the tables sometimes turn, he recognizes that his wife’s sacrifice is a sacrifice that is not always valued. “While I am singing there is a person who is with my daughter and I have to give visibility to that,” he said.
I studied singing for six or seven years, I went to and returned from Madrid on the same day
And, to end the interview, Piñero went back to the beginning of his career: “You came to music by accident and the fault lies with a karaoke, a waiter and a song by Sergio Dalma.” Laughing, Dani Fernández told how at the age of seven she started singing Only for youby Sergio Dalma, at a karaoke bar, lucky that the waiter there was a musician and recommended that he be taken to the conservatory.
Luckily or unfortunately, he ended up being kicked out of music school, where he studied bandurria, mandolin and piano. Fernández recognized that he cannot do anything without passion and that he only wanted to study music to accompany himself singing songs by Alejandro Sanz. Although with his voice he has been a responsible student: “I studied singing for six or seven years, I went to and returned from Madrid on the same day.”
Defender of destiny and its causality, the man from La Mancha embraced his past, including his time in the band Auryn, to be grateful for the place in which he now finds himself and, before leaving the stage, almost as an irony, he said goodbye to his audience singing Everything changes along with his musicians.