Jorge Drexler: "I hate ageism, which is the only discrimination that is still well-regarded"

BarcelonaJorge Drexler (Montevideo, 1964) is a wellspring of musical curiosity. His attitude and his eagerness to experiment within songs and emotions have made him a fundamental influence on countless musicians. Drexler's new adventure is the album Taracá (Sony, 2026), a lesson in sensitivity and rhythmic exuberance, with Uruguayan candombe as its driving force, which vindicates the restorative power of words and the subversive power of dance. It includes collaborations from Puerto Rican Young Miko, Andalusian Ángeles Toledano, and Meritxell Neddermann from Maresme, as well as Uruguayan groups like the murga Falta y Respeto, among others. The corresponding tour will stop at the Palau Sant Jordi in Barcelona on October 31st.

The last time you played in Barcelona was last year, at the Palau de la Música. You'll return, but to the Palau Sant Jordi. How do you manage such different stages?

— Well, they have palace in common [laughs]. They are two completely different concerts. I follow a dynamic that I learned from the Brazilians and that I really like: doing two types of tours. The album presentation tour, which is with the album's orchestration, and then another in a solo format and with a more open repertoire. Last year's was precisely the B-side, the intimate tour. The new album has a great deal of percussion, because it is very focused on the Uruguayan rhythm of candombe, and I had to form a band with percussionists who alternate drums, percussion, and vibraphone. Therefore, it is a much more expansive concert and suitable for an arena like the Palau Sant Jordi. We have set it up with two stages and I really like the use of space and image that we make of it.

Do you wear vertical screens or a horizontal one like Bad Bunny?

— A large horizontal one in the back and two vertical ones on the sides. And the direction is super important, the camera stabilizer is operated by a person who has a very important role because they have to establish a dialogue with the musicians and have their own choreography. The relationship you have with him and the camera is as important as the one you have with a musician. You have to know where he's going, see him coming and follow him a little.

Sometimes it gives me a strange feeling when I see the artist on stage too focused on the camera and showing themselves in profile to the audience. It's true that it's different if you look at the screen, but...

— Look, a camera is like a microphone: a signal amplifier, let's say. For me, the mistake is to fall into the automatisms of changing format and saying: "Understood, an arena or a broadcast is done like this, so let's do it like this." We work in black and white, for example, which is not, at all, necessary. People often understand the use of a camera and a production as a broadcast so you can see the concert up close. We have many plays of shadows and shots and focus. That is to say, we try to treat the screen as another artistic element. Once you delve into a project that stops being just audio and becomes audiovisual, you have to play a bit with these parameters.

Like C. Tangana on the El madrileño tourEl madrileño?

— Precisely. C. Tangana's show was a before and after for me. When we went to see it in the warehouse where they were rehearsing it, what you say happened, in the sense that there was a giant screen and if you looked at the stage you could see that there was a camera all the time. But when I saw it on tour I loved it because I realized it was the staging of a musical that is a movie. And this musical was seen on screen. What is important is never to lose focus that what we are doing is not simply a media discipline, but rather an artistic discipline.

In what sense?

— The song is an artistic genre. Sometimes it's hard to remember and say it. The song has monumental media and advertising potential, because it is a very brief epigram; it looks like graffiti, it's like a cry. A chorus is something that hooks you, and with a phrase and a melody in a chorus you can reach a lot of people. Then, a genre with this media and advertising potential makes it very easy, and it often happens, that the artist treats you as a media and advertising genre in the sense of saying: "What is fashionable? Who should we work with? What's sounding? What are the foundations? Which audience are we targeting? What should we talk about? Let's put together a team of fourteen people to write a song." I have absolutely nothing against songs with an advertising and media profile, but for me the song is an artistic genre. Furthermore, I am very interested in it being disseminated, but I am interested in it being disseminated according to artistic parameters. And the same applies to a show and to applied technology.

These more advertising processes, with fourteen people deciding around a table, are the antithesis of songwriting for Taracá as The words, which comes out a lot from intimacy.

— This has a profoundly personal authorship. I've had many stages in my life. I've had entire albums, most of which were written solely by me, lyrics and music. And I've had moments when I felt very curious about the outside world. I learned this with Marisa Monte, who is a systematic collaborator. Success, which comes from exitus, which in Latin means exit and also death. Success is, in a way, the death of a collective process of growth and communication and the transition to an individual process where it may happen that you choose to shut yourself in your world and consider that no one has anything to teach you, which is exactly the opposite of what I like. A moment comes when you start making meta-songs about the act of writing and you realize that you have to start opening up the game. I believe that everyone has a dose of themselves that they can admit and after a certain point you get fed up with yourself. It also happens that you don't imagine yourself doing very different things, like what I did with C. Tangana, but when you overcome the panic and do them it can be very liberating for your self. As the Zen masters say, it's like the ego falls away. That's why it's so refreshing to collaborate with people who are my opposite.

Returning to Las palabras. It is a song dedicated to your father, who died in 2024.

— My father was a child of war who fled Nazi Germany when he was four years old. The only country that received German Jews at that time was Bolivia, and then they went to Uruguay. Both my father and my mother were otolaryngologists, prominent doctors in a small town, and I, the eldest son, studied medicine and did my postgraduate degree in otolaryngology with six years of surgical experience, with my parents teaching me secret family techniques for operating. With this curriculum and after having established economic well-being and a secure future as a doctor in Uruguay, suddenly leaving for Spain to share an apartment with eight Uruguayans in the Chamberí neighborhood of Madrid is something my father did not understand at first. He was hard on me, because a father's role is sometimes hard, because he thought it was a mistake, but love soon prevailed. My father was an extremely loving person. He saw that I was happy, and that is what made him happiest.

How was he?

— If you want to know my father, not personally because he died, watch the video of the song ¿Qué será que es? [the version by the Brazilian Gonzaguinha included in Taracá]. It's a video made with a selection of Super-8 fragments filmed by him. When you watch a film or a photograph, you can understand many things about the person who was holding the camera. Especially when you see many images, you realize that there is an angle of observation, a subjectivity. If you want to know my father, watch this video, which is a compilation of his vision of the family environment in the seventies. His vision is extremely loving. A friend told me: "Do you realize all the love with which this is filmed?". Las palabras was not written thinking about my father, but it is dedicated to him posthumously. He had that very Jewish thing of the people of the book; he had a very high veneration for language and the spoken and written word. Las palabras closes the album and the music has something of the ceremonial, of restlessness, of Greek tragedy. I think he would have liked it.

Did he/she like the murga, like the one that plays in the song?

— No, it wasn't that he didn't like it. He had another Uruguay. His musical tastes were not national. He was an extremely cosmopolitan guy. It was my mother who liked the murga. She liked Uruguayan music, it was creole, creole. And my father listened to everything, from Monteverdi to Bob Marley; he liked everything that happened outside. But the murga has a Greek chorus role in that song, and he did like Greek tragedy. It's the chorus that makes a comment or a warning, as in Woody Allen's film "Powerful Aphrodite, by Woody Allen. "Let's use words to add nuances, let's seek subtlety..." I don't know why the hell I wrote that, because I don't like giving advice in songs or speaking in the majestic I. I couldn't sing it, but I thought it could be "the voice of the people", in quotes, since the murga is said to be the voice of the people. It's a very popular genre in Uruguay, like plena in Puerto Rico. And when I decided to give this voice to the murga, the song could be closed. It was like a liberation. My father did like this theatrical treatment.

The first time I heard Taracá I thought it had to do with Debí tirar más fotos by Bad Bunny, not only because of the exuberance and rhythmic variety, but also for the reconnection with some familiar and traditional things from your country. There is your father, but also candombe, and at the same time you put a bit of trap in it.

— Yes, it's a good analysis, but C. Tangana had already done it before with El madrileño [2021], which is an album I participated in and feel very close to. With Pucho [C. Tangana] the same thing happened to me as with Joaquín Sabina, with thirty years difference. Both have a clear-sighted identity vision of the world of song. When I arrived in Spain, I had two albums made in Uruguay with the intention of making pop, especially the second one, Radar [1994], which was a power trio album: drums, bass, guitar, very rhythmic and with many effects. And when I arrived in Spain, I realized that the identity of someone from a small country like Uruguay can only be perceived in perspective. And what was I contributing? Sabina influenced me a lot. He told me: "This, this samba, this version of Alfredo Zitarrosa, yes; this other song with just guitar and voice, also". Immediately, I realized that this was what I was contributing.

And it shows in your discography.

— Since then I have had pendular periods of regionalism, cosmopolitanism, regionalism, cosmopolitanism. Frontera [1999] was a record of regionalism; Bailar en la cueva [2014], of pan-Americanism, a more open regionalism. Salvavidas de hielo [2017] is a completely cosmopolitan record, with a symphony orchestra, Rubén Blades, a basic quartet of drums, bass, keyboard, and guitar... And like Sabina in his time, Pucho also made me see things. When we recorded the song Nominao, he told me: "Jorge, take the effect off the guitar, put the voice closer...". It helped me a lot to strip away modernist pretensions from what I was doing. To make me see that there is nothing more modern than what is authentic and that nothing is older than what was modern a year ago.

And does this learning reflect on the album Taracá?

— Something happens... I really like urban music and above all I hate ageism, which is the only discrimination that is still well regarded. Because, fortunately, other discriminations based on gender, sexual orientation, even religious and national ones, have declined a lot. Some almost entirely. Any discriminatory expression you have in certain areas even implies a prohibition, and I think that's wonderful. But ageism... There are many people of my generation who say: "It's just that the music of these young people today..." And they don't realize that this, pointing out an entire group in this way, is a discriminatory act. The album is full of references to this, in songs like Ante la duda, baila, and with these trap fragments. But it all started as a much more urban album. I went to Puerto Rico, the capital of urban music, because I wanted to work with Young Miko's producers, now the most powerful female force in urban music. And then, one of the producers, Mauro, tells me: "Look, she wants to sing, she doesn't want to rap. Make one of your songs." And what I wanted to do with her was a hyper-sexualized reggaeton because I don't have that semantic field, the bedroom language. Reggaeton has expanded the semantic field, it has brought bedroom language to the mainstream, to the everyday language of song. And expanding the semantic field in an artistic genre is very difficult. But, lo and behold, she wanted a different kind of song, without effects, with two guitars and two voices. In the end, it turns out that the only one who wanted to make an urban album was me [laughs]. So, I took two reggaeton and trap producers to Uruguay to record an almost acoustic album, an almost unprocessed album. Like the vowel A. That's why it's also called Taracá, because A is the default sound of the human vocal apparatus. If you squeeze a human being, they make an A. Because the larynx opens, the resonators open. All vowels have resistance to air except A. It's the unprocessed human sound, like the album... Sorry, maybe I'm changing the subject.

Before finishing, I would like you to explain the importance, both rhythmic and symbolic, that the candombe "chico" drum has on this album. chico del candombe.

— Candombe has three drums: the piano, the repique, and the chico. The first two are large drums with fixed patterns, but with a lot of room for improvisation and dialogue. The repique allows for a lot of virtuosity and the piano has a lot of responsibility and also virtuosity in the low register. The chico, on the other hand, goes "paracà, paracà, paracà, paracà" all the time without stopping. [You can listen to Jorge Drexler's explanation in this audio].

It's almost like a reggae guitarist.

— It's like the "cha, cha, cha, cha" curve, and you can't move from there. The drum boy has an enviable humility and vocation for service in an era of egocentrism and Instagram where everyone has a distorted and improved version of themselves to expose and is constantly seeking personal limelight. It is a profession of service, which are professions in decline because everyone wants to be noticed. But what has most amazed me about the drum boy is that behind this apparent simplicity, "hold on, hold on, hold on and repeat", there is a key that is a koan musical. It is the koan of Zen, which is the paradox that has the form of a logical proposition, nonsensical. On the drum boy, the strong beat of the hand is on the second half-note of the bar, which is the weakest beat of the bar. And when you hear a drum roll and there are two or three guys together playing, a rhythmic paradox is produced that generates a transit. For me, it is a spiritual shuttle. Then, the guy, in its humility, has the power to shift the planet's axis. For me, it is the most powerful drum because it is what distorts your temporal perception and has the same purpose as the koan, which is to distort your reason, the default neural network which is what sets the coordinates in the brain. And when this breaks, you leave the ego and remain in presence, in the here and now. It is a drum that to play it you must not have much ego and, furthermore, mechanically dissolve the ego. It is a drum that you must play without thinking. It is a technology of mindfulness, the drum boy. What happens is that when I tell them, those who touch the guy they laugh at me, obviously, because there is no one else mindfulness that those who are not aware of it. While I was doing Taracá I thought the same thing would happen to me as with Border, which would be very difficult to function in Spain. As Border, it's an album that has very local codes, and I don't come from a career like Bad Bunny's, who already has the whole world in his hands and can tell people: "Well, now I'll show you the jam my grandmother used to make and you'll love it." I don't have that, but nevertheless, people are listening to it and seem to understand what it's about.