The Making Of "Amor Y Otros Desastres" - Part I

Well guys, I decided to take some time to share with you a little bit of the creative process of my latest work: “Amor Y Otros Desastres”. Here I’ll tell you about the experience of writing these songs, the rhythms and influences that inspired me to create the whole concept for this new project and the expectations I had for this songbook.

Part One: The Concept

I always wanted to write something in Spanish, but I never felt it was the right time or I had the right theme to write about. I had some songs for sure, but I definitely never planned to release a songbook in Spanish, at least not at the moment. One day, I was sitting in my room and I started to scrawl some lines that came to my mind. I had one more song done and when I was saving the file I was surprised to note that I’ve already had almost 10, what it could be perfectly become a songbook. Therefore I decided I’ve had enough material to begin this “Spanish project”, but I still needed to find something to talk about, a subject that I could express the way I see and understand the Hispanic culture. I read again all the songs I’ve already written and I could realize they had something in common, but I couldn’t actually see what it was.

A few weeks later, I rent a movie called “Love and Other Disasters” (with Brittany Murphy) and when the movie ended, the answer hit me like a punch and I knew what I’d talk about: love. I’d already decided that I’d want to impress in my work some aspects of Latin culture and the way I found it was through love, or the way of feeling the many kinds of it. When people think about something related to the Spanish language they usually think about things that are tragic, passionate, intense… The songs I’d written until that moment had those features and all of them were about relationships. Love was seen and written for different angles where it could be good and sweet or painful and tragic. Because of this, the lyrics presented a wide range of emotions and each of them had a single characteristic that made them unique, even when they were about similar themes. Those singular features of each lyric made this songbook colorful and rich of different kinds of feelings. And that was the way I wanted to picture this work.