What's your best musical memory? 40 musicians answer the question.

Barcelona"What is your best memory related to music, and what memory would you like to forget?" This double question has been repeated in most of the interviews with musicians (and people linked to music) published in the ARA, especially in the last year and a half. The answers sometimes relate to professional experiences, but there are also those that involve very intimate and family memories. In this first compilation, we compile a selection of responses about the best memories. They include Roger Mas, Julieta, The Tyets, Maria Hein, Raquel García-Tomás, Pau Vallvé, Mazoni...

Anna Alàs i Jové

"I feel bad saying this because we shouldn't be marked by awards, but the second prize at the Stuttgart song contest of the Hugo Wolf Akademie, in 2010, with the pianist Alexander Fleischer, was a very, very sweet moment, because it is a genre that I am passionate about and because I had invested many years in training.

Ona Salabert (Pollen Allergy)

"When we started having a van. For me it was a lot top, that moment of going from going up and down in cars, where you were crushed, to having a van and being able to go with more peace of mind. This was a big change for Alérgicas, because we had been going around in shopping carts carrying our instruments..."

Eva Amaral and Juan Aguirre (Amaral)

"When we saw Nick Cave at the Teatro Principal in Zaragoza. We didn't have a penny, but we saw a foreign-looking man who was part of Nick Cave's team and we said to him: "Look, we don't have any money, but we'd like to see the concert." And he gave us two tickets! The most brutal thing we have. It must have been 1994. The disco era Let love inThe concert began with Do you love me? We'd only heard a few songs on Radio 3, and even then, we knew it was the place to be, but we couldn't afford the tickets because it was a very precarious time in our lives. I think a lot of people came to the concert that way and ended up becoming Nick Cave devotees."

Pol Batlle

"The most powerful memory I have is seeing how a person who can't even speak, and can barely move, reacts when you play a song. No doctors, no pills, no treatments, nothing exists capable of achieving this reaction. This is the case with my mother. And it's something that has made me change and consider how important things are. What has happened to me with music."

Vassil Lambrinov (Blaumut)

"The best thing is making music with your colleagues, enjoying it and having the audience connect with you. It's happened to me with Blaumut, but also with symphonic projects. I remember that in 1999 Rostropovich, one of the greatest cellists in history, came to where Oriol and I were studying to play the Dvo. music concerto, and I remember the concert as a very good experience, of transcending the real part and connecting with that unique part of the soul, of the spirit, which is a language that only music can express."

Guillem Solé (Owls)

"The first concert we did. We were 13 years old, and it was organized by Jaume Nin and I, who are still together in Buhos. We set up a stage in our backyard and tangled up half the town. There were a lot of people applauding, and it was the first time I felt the magical effect of the stage," and.

Aleix Turon (Cala Vento)

"We have a song with Lluís Gavaldà, Total liquidation. When we recorded it, we went to Sant Feliu de Guíxols, to the Ultramarinos studio, and we didn't know Lluís very well; in fact, it was the second time we'd met. Playing with Lluís was very special for us, because of what he represents, because we're huge fans, because of Els Pets' songs, because of everything. He had to return to Girona, and we took him in my van... I have very good memories, because it's one of those unexpected things that happen."

Èric Vergés (The Catarras)

"When we were 16, we dropped out of high school so we could take the train to Barcelona to see a concert by the Swedish band Millencolin. It was at Razzmatazz, back when it was still called Zeleste [in 2000]. It was a totally new experience for us, and it was mind-blowing. It was like, 'Wow, it's here!'"

Joan Colomo

"I remember the whole period from 2000 to 2005, when I played with Zeidun, Moksha, The Red Sexy Band. We were young, we took a lot of drugs, we had a great time and the concerts were magical, even if there wasn't an audience, but we went to play in Arnedo, even if we went to play in Arnedo, magical. Then life dirties you, somehow, and things are no longer as intense and exciting."

Joe Twilight

"When I was 9 or 10 years old I went to a concert where my dad played rhythm guitar with the Lirones Caretos. They were playing at the Rose Festival in Sant Feliu de Llobregat. They were doing a mix of Burning and Lynyrd Skynryd, a bit of a hooligan, and I felt very org. I put on the videos they made with a VHS, and I was really excited to see my dad playing."

Nilo Rojo (Elite)

"I remember when we were very young, I bought the CD and DVD Bullet in the Bible (2005) by Green Day, with numerous recorded concerts. It was before YouTube. Back then, you didn't have the opportunity to see so many things, and seeing that whole amazing show is a very nice memory."

Pau Figueres

"I remember the times I went to Palautordera to see Arcadio Marín's workshop. He was a superb luthier. Every time he finished a guitar or made a tweak, it was magical. I felt the excitement of a little boy on Three Kings' Night."

Raquel García-Tomás

"One of my best memories is from when I was very little. My mother listened to The Carpenters, and it calmed me down. I knew that, periodically, at home, we would hear what I liked so much, but I didn't know how to say it. I remember one day – I must have been about three years old, because I learned to read when I was four, and I still knew how to tell my mother – and I insisted because she was very annoying, she was so convinced of what she wanted to hear... And in the end, my mother let me rummage through the cassettes my father recorded, which didn't have a cover or anything, but she didn't call him, she called him. I picked it up and it was The Carpenters, I promise..."

Marc Gili (Dorian)

"When I was a little kid and my dad made me put the vinyl on the record player. He'd say, 'Marco, what record do you want to listen to? Look, take this one by Neil Young, this one by Serrat.' And I'd put it on. That creates a tremendous love for music in this music with this seed, this very artistic seed, the seed in this music, which is music."

Julia and Pau Serrasolsas (Broom)

"We have very fond memories of the Tinglado de Vilanova i la Geltrú concert in 2022, where we gave a concert that I experienced very intensely and very consciously. It was a Tinglado with Manel, and it was like: 'Wow, you're playing for the first time with the top figures.'"

Maria Hein

"If it's in a more professional setting, it would probably be the Felanitx concert I did last year, at my town's festival. It was an incredible concert, it was packed, packed, packed. It really moved me. I'd never seen so many people singing my songs together at a concert and I felt like I was doing less than normal, it often happens that it often happens to your project, but it was the complete opposite and I'll always remember it. And a memory that's not related to my professional setting... I remember learning a Frank Sinatra song by ear when I was very young, from watching my mother listen to him, Strangers in the Night, and I remember sitting down at the piano to try out what the notes were. And one day I played it for my dad and mom, and they were amazed. I played it everywhere. I'd go somewhere with a piano, and when I was 5 or 6, I'd sit down and play the song."

Ju

"More than a good memory, it's a very pleasant and fulfilling feeling, when in the summer we took the car with my parents and went on vacation. On the way we put on Albert Pla, who I didn't like at all at the time. We put on The drought, that song about "I have toilet paper stuck to my ass," and I thought: how ordinary and horrible. Back then I listened to American artists, and I loved all the glitter, the prettiness, and this thing of pop starAnd I listened to Albert Pla and thought: "What's going on here in Catalonia?" I didn't understand a thing. Everything changed when I understood the concept. Later, when I was studying in Barcelona, ​​my roommates and I would listen to Albert Pla after lunch. In any case, my memory is that it was a vacation, that there was peace and joy."

Juliet

"The first song I made, which was a bit like saying, 'Wow, I can make songs!' I remember that night, going to bed and feeling like a sense of calm, saying, 'I can do this.' Afterwards, my first concert at the Heliogàbal was also very nice, because it was very impactful to see people singing my songs."

Lia Kali

"Especially the first times. As the years go by, you lose the sensations you experienced with your first kiss, those things that happen to you when you're a child and you're just beginning to discover the world. And music has given them back to me. For example, the first time I went up to the Palau Sant Jordi with Kase.O and did that collaboration with an artist I'd listened to for so long. In a way, it brought back that childhood or innocence, those beautiful things you feel the first time."

Leiva

"I remember it as something very transformative, very happy and fulfilling, which I've struggled to find again: the first time I saw a band called Doctor Jekyll playing in a garage. There were four kids playing, and something very, very beautiful happened to me. I said: 'I want that.'"

Maika Makovski

"I was very happy to hear my father play. I'm told I used to sit in the front row, people would come up to me and I'd beat the shit out of them so they'd come up front and let me see my father. But later, as a music teacher, my father was horrible. He had no patience."

Dani Martín

"The dining room at my parents' house, where music was always playing. Serrat, Silvio Rodríguez, Camarón, Enrique Morente, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Los Brincos, Smash, everything. And when Los Ronaldos arrived in 1987, my father played them and he liked them. There was a kind of free atmosphere. The whole family. There were no prejudices. I would put on Extremoduro and my father would listen to it too.

Roger Mas

"The best memory is with my grandfather in the stairwell on Bou Street, when he didn't teach me to play the clarinet but rather played with me. He played the saxophone and I played the clarinet, and we were in the stairwell because there was a resonance that he liked more. He would make a sound and I would imitate him. And the satisfaction of my grandfather not teaching me, but playing, that is surely the most beautiful thing I have experienced with music."

Jaume Pla (Mazoni)

"I remember the concert of the album tour very well Euphoria 5 - Hope 0 (2009) at the Apolo. There are concerts where I feel like a medium between the audience and the music, like time passes differently, and I don't think about things like, "Now this song will come," "Remember to press this pedal," or "Remember to say this between songs," but rather it's a kind of state. This is what I'm most proud of. There are also geeky things, like when we did a cover of The Velvet Underground, Sister Ray, at a BankRobber festival where each band played for half an hour: we decided to play only this song, which already lasts almost twenty minutes."

Víctor Medem (director of L'Auditori)

"A moment I will never forget in life was when L'Auditori opened in 1999. That week I went with my parents to hear the Novena by Bruckner, conducted by Víctor Pablo Pérez. That sensation of hearing a Bruckner symphony for the first time—that is, the grandiosity of the sound of a clearly large-scale symphonic work, with acoustics like those of L'Auditori—is unforgettable."

Judit Neddermann

"Many times we have reached incredible places making music. For example, singing with Joan Manuel Serrat at the Palau de la Música, I remember watching us finish. Lucia"I remember that moment very much."

Miki Núñez

"I'll tell you two. One, when we were listening to the record The beautiful Millennium With my parents, going down to Peñíscola on vacation. I even remember the smell of my dad's old car, and listening to Mike Oldfield; I loved it. And the other memory, the first concert I did at La Mercè, in 2019, which was the first of that tour: when we started playing We will writeMy friends, the musicians, looked at me and told me to take out my inears [the headphones that musicians use as live monitors]. I didn't know what was happening, and what was happening was that people were singing the song. It was incredible. I'll remember that moment for the rest of my life. Plus, it was raining and everything had an epic feel like something out of a movie."

Joan Oller (general director of the Palace of Music)

"I have a very strong affinity with Gustav Mahler and specifically with the Symphony No. 2I remember very clearly when Franz-Paul Decker, who was director of the OBC, conducted it at the Palau de la Música, when L'Auditori didn't yet exist. I came on Friday and went back on Sunday, it was so moving. But this wouldn't be the concert I would choose. What I would choose is the one from June 2019, ten years after the Mossos d'Esquadra had entered the Palau. We did the Symphony No. 2 conducted by Gustavo Dudamel with the Orfeó Català and the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, who gave the Palau's resurrection concert. For me, it was very, very, very moving."

Marco Parrot

"After Casal Rock [The TV3 program] I had enough money to lock several musicians in the studio, and every day we shared ideas, composed, and recorded, all at the same time, making the most of all the instruments in the studio. The way we worked was very vibrant; there was a lot of interaction with the musicians, and we improvised a lot. This gave me great pleasure. And at lunchtime, we always had good meals. It was a very good time, one I wish had lasted forever.

Rita Payés

"The best are the meetings or jams where there is no prejudice and we are all sharing; the hours pass and in those moments I am always very happy."

Quimi Portet

"I'll tell you two, because I have a dual musical life. One is the recording ofReasonable astronomy (1993), from The Last of the Row, and the other from Electromagnetic Songbook (1999), which is my third solo album. Professionally, these two moments are unforgettable and will always be."

Xantal Rodríguez (Remedy of Ca la Fresca)

"The concert the other day in Arbúcies will go down in history. It was much more than a dream album presentation. Because we did it in a very small theater in Arbúcies, where I did theater as a child, with the sets of the director, who died many years ago. He painted some super cool sets that were there. Collaborators on the album: Maria Callís, who recited, Carme Vives [of the group Reina], Lluc Valverde [of La Ludwig Band], Ildefons Alonso. It was very magical.

Rozalén

"I guess the best thing is singing with my family, hearing my mother sing while we harvested olives."

Axel Pi (Sidonie)

"There's one that comes to mind a lot, especially when I go to my mom's house, because that's where I experienced it. It was the day of the first rehearsal Marc and I did with Jes [who would be his bandmates in the band Sidonie]. Marc had gone to pick Jes up with the car, and they came to get me at the house. On the street, I saw the two of them chatting, waiting for me. That image leaving my parents' house is very engraved in my mind.

Salvador Sobral

"During my daughter's birth I had the disc in Come Sunday Charlie Haden and Hank Jones, however, the labor lasted a long time. The album ends and on Spotify, this fucking algorithm starts playing cocktail jazz. She grabbed me and I said, "Jenna, our daughter can't be born to cocktail jazz." She wouldn't let go because it's all so intense, but in a moment that left me for a second, I ran to Spotify and put on Keith Jarrett, the album. The melody at night, with youAnd Aïda was born with Blame it on my youthI can never forget this moment. Blame it on my youth"I love the song."

Marta Torrella (Relena Cake)

"Discovering what it is to sing in a heart was very heavyWe sang in a choir at the Can Ponsic music school when we were 15 or 16. The choir was held on Friday afternoons, from seven to nine, or from six to eight. When I enrolled in music school, they told me that if I wanted to teach piano and clarinet lessons, I also had to teach choral singing. But when I found out it was on a Friday afternoon, it was like, "What a drag, but it's the day you go to the park to eat cookies with your friends." heavy "Let me do this." But we went through the tube, and afterward it was sacred. It was the best afternoon of the week: being with twenty or thirty singers, feeling within the harmony, symbiotically sympathetic with all these people and discovering music. superheavy, because the director offered us a strange repertoire, with crazy harmonic colors... I felt pretty strong there."

Oriol de Ramon (The Tyets)

"For me, the most exciting moment of the group was when we played at the Apolo. When we finished we went down to the dressing rooms and we found all our friends, our partners, the whole team, with a cake, with an epic sun that said "It will be an epic tour."

Xavier Coca (The Tyets)

"Uri has said the beginning of that tour and I say the end, after filling two Sant Jordi Clubs with sold-out, with 10,000 people. It was very, very hard, because you had 5,000 people every day who had paid an entrance fee to come see you, and everyone was willing to give it their all. It was very exciting."

Gorka Urbizu

"I have a lot of concerts: from the time we played with just one person in the audience in Nantes to the biggest performance, with more than 20,000 people, and against all odds, because in big concerts sometimes something slips through the net, but that one in Kobetamendi on the farewell tour of 2010. But musical: I must have been 6 or 7 years old when they gave me an accordion and I managed to play it. Zorionak zuri for congratulating my grandmother. It was very emotional."

Pau Vallvé

"I remember one day, many years ago, a concert by a band called A Silver Mt. Zion, a collective from Canada with musicians from the group Godspeed You! Black Emperor. I'd say that at that time I was already playing with Maria Coma and with projects like Estanislau Verdet, but not yet with Pau Vallvé. The concert [in 2004], and the guys were playing in a circle looking at each other, without clapperboards or anything, just playing and living it, and shouting and even out of tune. And I remember vibrating really hard, like a cult, a tribe... That blew my head off. I remember trembling and everything, saying: the door just opened for me, this is freaking me out. I went for tracks and started making demos of horrible things, but I could do them myself!"