“Art is definitely telling us all the time what is happening in society, where we have a red focus that we have to attend,” said the singer in an interview with EFE during the presentation of his new album The show.
“The debate that is having now goes further, is directed towards (…) exalting or being allied with a social reality,” Garcia explained about the controversy around the Mexican musical genre that extol drug trafficking and violence, songs that were criticized by the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Composer career
As a composer, the member of the Flag Sin, is one of the most important figures of the Mexican ballad with letters performed by artists such as Alejandro Fernández, Carlos Rivera, Gloria Trevi or Ana Torroja, reaching figures of 817 million views in Spotify, with the success The root, from Natalia Lafourcade.
He explained that since childhood he wrote songs, and that at 16 he discovered what the composer’s figure was and thought: “That is, I don’t have to sing them, but someone else can sing them and pay you.”
Since then, songs like I dedicated myself to LostEO I’m going to lose you Alejandro Fernández have broken geographical barriers and have become hymns of the country’s ballad.
“Most of the time I tried to send songs to an artist to sing them, he doesn’t sing them. Rather, I think people fall in love with the songs and find them and say, ‘This song is for me and I want to record it,” Garcia said.
The Mexican said he has never regretted that the songs he has composed would find a voice that was not his.
“I think things happen naturally. It would be ungrateful to want to think in retrospect.”
On the evolution of music from the first launch of the group that forms with the Argentine Noel Schajris in 2000, he regretted that “has changed a lot” and that before musical consumption “was to some extent romantic.”
“The show”: an album from the before
“An album is the portrait of a moment of a person’s life, it is a few months of his life, a year of work from the composition to the end of the production. That document represents that period of time,” Leonel explained in relation to his new album.
Your last launch, The showwith the collaborations of Lafourcade, Ivana, Eden Muñoz and Arath Herce, was recorded live “doing a little resistance” to the musical trend of programming and trying that “people could live that experience of listening to an record recorded live.”
He explained that the way of making music has changed and compares it with the cooking process. “I ate Paella as a child and was delicious, but it takes a long time to prepare, it is very difficult, it is very complicated. Then we are going to eliminate it from the menu,” he equated with laughter. “I don’t want people to lose the opportunity to hear that type of more complex, more difficult recipes.”