Spanish singer Rosalía previews today in a podcast with The New York Times fragments of several songs from ‘Lux’, an album “completely different” from her previous works in which she sings in thirteen languages.
Rosalía is the guest artist of the new episode of ‘Popcast’ in which, together with journalists Jon Caramanica and Joe Coscarelli, she delves into her new album and the figures that inspired her to make it.
“It’s been three years working on a project completely different from what I had done before. It was a little scary,” confesses the Catalan, who speaks in English during the episode.
The musician revealed to the newspaper fragments of ‘Sexo, violencia y llantas’, ‘Dios es un stalker’, ‘Sauvignion Blanc’, ‘La rumba del perdón’, ‘La perla’, ‘Reliquia’ and ‘Mio cristo’, songs in which genres such as flamenco, opera and pop are intermingled.
Rosalía and ‘LUX’: A journey narrated in thirteen languages
The tracks follow a narrative divided into four movements, forming “a journey” in which the listener “will encounter different voices” and hear up to thirteen languages, including Ukrainian, German, Arabic and Japanese.
To achieve this, the singer says that, for a whole year, she has dedicated herself “exclusively to the lyrics and phonetics” of the album, which will be released on November 7.
Although he says he used Google’s translator to hear how his lyrics sounded in other languages, he assures that he did not use artificial intelligence, but that “it’s all research and practice”.
His exploration of other languages comes from his desire to “want to understand each other better,” and he adds that the use of different languages in ‘Lux’ “has a lot to do with the story” that inspires him in each song.
Thus, he points out, if he sings in German – as in the first single from the album, ‘Berghain’ – it is because he is inspired by Hildegard of Bingen, a German saint, and if he sings in Spanish in ‘Sauvignon Blanc’ it is because he is inspired by Saint Teresa.
The album draws from feminine mysticism and works by authors such as Simone Weil or Chris Kraus, as well as poetic nuns, feminist theory and hagiographies, biographical works about saints.
“That spiritual feeling has always been there, I had just never rationalized it or tried to intellectualize it,” he explains.
When approaching this album, he asked himself: “What do I need to read? Because, at the end of the day, making records for me is an excuse to do what I really want to do.”
And in this case, he says, “I just wanted to read more,” because it had been a long time since I had read as much as I would like to, and I also wanted to “delve deeper” into different types of music, as in “a research project.
The Catalan singer held a listening party in Mexico yesterday where randomly selected fans were able to listen exclusively to ‘Lux’, an event that will be repeated in other cities such as New York, Barcelona and Buenos Aires, reported Agencia EFE.
Find out more at ‘QueOnnda.com’.
