Quim Carandell: "This summer I have felt as if we were peeing cologne"

BarcelonaHe has no WhatsApp photo, it's not clear if due to strategic artist opacity or natural shyness. Quim Carandell (Barcelona, 1997) sits down at the terrace where we met and huddles inside a sweatshirt that confirms the arrival of autumn. I celebrate it, because the singer of La Ludwig Band, the group's flagship man and the brains behind the lyrics, could not grant interviews until after the summer. After years of growing on the fringes, with the latest album and the respective tour, La Ludwig has broken through its ceiling.

What should I know about you to understand the musician that you are?

— I have spent a lot of time summering and living in a town in the Alt Empordà, Espolla, where every year the best glosadors from the Catalan Countries came to celebrate an improvised singing combat. It made a great impression on me when I was little.

You were a finalist when you were not even eighteen years old and the town still remembers the achievement; they dubbed you "the Danish prince".

— I verified that the verses I had in my head worked, that I wasn't crazy. I have drawn heavily from traditional song, from humor and that very Spanish thing of the chascarrillo, and from something political without being explicit, as is all the common folk gathered singing the same thing. This has shaped me as a musician and as a communicator; on stage, I act more as a communicator than as a musician.

Any gesture of rebellious music?

— At eighteen I decided that I would not study and I went to live and work in the Empordà; I lost sight of my friends and Barcelona. I did not collect my first musician's salary until five years later. I have those years of misery and eating a lot of white rice very romanticized.

The family?

— My parents gave me all the support in the world. I haven't had to fight against myself; life has made it easy for me by bringing me together with friends with similar interests and giving me certain talents. I have worked hard to take care of what I do, as if it were my little kitten, since I was fifteen years old. I have hit the wall a lot and I have changed my strategy many times, but I am not an example of overcoming.

Did you achieve the success you dreamed of this summer?

— It has gone very well. This summer I have felt as if we were pissing cologne. I had always been a great worrier, and now we are filling every venue. Every day is a victory.

And how do you feel now that Ludwig is in fashion?

— I feel that many people love me and that many flatter me and want to bring me to their events. But I hope to get some benefit out of it without having to be the most famous person in the world. Groups that arouse great consensus in Catalan music burn out quickly, and I find that it is good to always go a bit against the grain.

Do you not have the ambition to fill stadiums like Oques Grasses?

— Of course I want Ludwig to be in the scout songbooks 30 years from now and for children to remember S'ha mort l'home més vell d'Espolla. But, given how this country works, and how long groups last at the top… I want to work on this with my friends for a long time.

Your latest album is the most mainstream.

— Yes, but that is perfectly compatible with artistic integrity. The beauty of it is that the lyrics that came out might not have been the most appropriate ones: they are very sad, with few choruses and a lot of lyrics. But, when it came to making the music, we all wanted to do something lighter so that many people would listen to Ludwig.

Does the album mock the audience a little?

— I never make fun of the audience, but I do make fun of myself. This album is perhaps the most honest one I've made because I wrote it more for myself than for others, and I speak to myself with a lot of self-criticism and irony.

You do make fun of the Catalan music scene a little bit...

— I did indeed write the album very much obsessed with the job continuity of the Ludwig. I was not a great listener of Catalan music, and now I know ALL the groups. And I do not have a conformist opinion of them.

Relax.

— The world of Catalan music is small and self-complacent. Right away everything is fine, in Catalonia, and that causes the artistic question to be abandoned immediately. That said: we have had many critiques with this album, more than ever, and that makes me trust in Catalonia. That people look for the weak points means that what you do has value and challenges.

To what emotional place have the album and the summer concerts taken you?

— I am going through an identity crisis. Far from comforting me, the fact that it went so well and that I enjoyed it so much puts terrible pressure on me. To move others you must be moved yourself, and that is a massive task that I do not know if I will be capable of repeating.

They say that an infallible creative method is to copy, and it has been said a lot that on your latest album you were flirting with plagiarism.

— What I do is not plagiarism. Artistic creation is to re-traverse paths that someone else has already trodden and to leave one's own footprint, and a good revisiting is already a good work. That said, I have always been very afraid of this subject. Not afraid of being discovered, but because of what remains of me. Am I really an artist if I copy everything? Because I copy everything, all the time. I have done a lot of therapy to tell myself that I am.

I will finish, therefore, by plagiarizing a handful of questions from the Proust questionnaire, the most famous in the history of the interview genre. Which personal defect do you find hardest to tolerate?

— My physique.

Which flaw of others do you not forgive.

— The tantrum.

What do you regret the most?

— Of having been very afraid.

How would you like to die?

— Sleeping.