More and more contemporary artists are turning to the tradition of Latin American rhythms: bolero, ranchera, cumbia, mambo, dip, samba, bossa nova… Serenade for my funeral, the recent and first album of the duet BOYGIRLmade up of the Colombian Juan Galeano and the Mexican Fernanda Casillas, responds to that trend, but with the distinctive seal of creating with them an interesting fusion to which they add the tone of the rock and the psychedelia.
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“In the end, any music that marks a culture comes to have its timelessness. Although it mutates and transforms, the root is still there. Music is one of the few things that has really been able to pass from generation to generation, even before we could record music, but changing with the tools of each moment, which is the same thing that happens to us now,” says Fernanda Casillas, in Interview with The Sun of Mexicoabout the importance of Latin genres and their ability to be reinvented.
The singer-songwriter says that they had to spend more than five years to carry out this project, despite the fact that both musicians had already collaborated on each other’s presentations and productions. It would not be until now, after remembering the great artistic synergy, that they turned to composing, making a study of the genres that had marked their careers, but also of the feelings and emotions that, they consider, characterize the feelings of the hearts Latin Americans.
“We definitely wanted this album to have a melancholic and bittersweet connotation, because in Latin culture we usually celebrate tragedies and even laugh at them. I mean, yes, I’m going through difficult times, but let’s laugh and dance,” he explains. Boxes, who describes the process of composing and recording this album as a work of “experimentation”in which the analysis of tradition was combined, but also the personal experiences of each musician, and which ended up being expressed in the oxymoron of the album’s title.
The songs of Pedro Infante, Chavela Vargas, Caetano Veloso, Simón Díaz, Gabriel Ríos and more, They were some of the many ingredients with which these musicians were cooking, little by little their own recipe. Regarding the supposed originality that artists “must” present with each of their songs, Fernanda assures that this does not lie in nothing, but in the learning of others.
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“Everything comes from the inspiration that other artists can provoke in us, it is like making a great tribute to them. This is something natural in all types of music: taking the root to chew it and make it part of you. Nobody is finding the black thread, for art there has never been something completely new,” says Casillas, who anticipates that the debut of BOYGIRL It will be in Bogotá Colombia, but soon he will announce presentations in our country.