Anna Roig: "The hardest moment is when you know what you don't want but you don't know where you are going"

Although she has been living in Vilafranca del Penedès for ten years and has established deep ties there, Anna Roig (Sant Sadurní d’Anoia, 1981) does not feel entirely like a Vilafranca native, and that is fine with her. The singer, who was the voice of Anna Roig i L'Ombre de Ton Chien, assures that she will never be what in local slang is known as VTV –Vilafranca from all her life–, because the place from which she knows stories and genealogies is her native Sant Sadurní. A place where she not only discovered her artistic vocation, but where she also participated in the family business.

Cal Feru.

— It is the family business, which comes from my great-grandfather, Pere Roig Grau, who traded wine. He used to go to the farmers of the region to get the wines, then he used to go to Barcelona to the wine fair, he sold it to the innkeepers. He transported it by cart… The next step was to set up in Sant Sadurní in a wine warehouse, in 1934.

Where does the name come from?

— From an ancestor who was very fierce, very wild. You don't know to what extent it is legend or truth. But now, curiously, when you say Cal Feru everyone thinks of the shop. My brother, when he went to high school, they called him "el Feru". Now my father is sometimes called: "Are you Anna Roig's father?", but I was always "Cal Feru's little girl". In the shop we have a museum that explains the whole evolution, from the purchase of the warehouse for I don't know how many pesetas to the purchase of the first truck. I often remember the shop under construction; we always had new ideas.

He worked there when he was young.

— It was my first job, because that's what was expected, but I didn't enjoy it. I preferred to stay upstairs on the apartment –we've always had the apartment above the shop–, with my cat and the piano. If I wanted to see my parents, I had to go down to the shop, because a shopkeeper's schedule is a slave's. There came a time when it was more of an economic exchange: I wanted to buy a saxophone, and they told me "come and work extra hours and we'll pay you for it". That's how my first work experience was: putting wine in bulk, tidying up boxes of wines and cavas, filling shelves, selling with the little knowledge I had. There was a time when we made cava at home, and it was my job to operate the dispenser, which is the machine that dispenses the expedition liquor, which is what makes a cava more or less sweet. It was a very simple job, but it was my specialty.

Has the family business marked you professionally?

— The mechanical work itself hasn't influenced me much, but growing up in an entrepreneurial context, having to pull many strings, has. In a business, you look at the numbers as much as you attend to a client, as much as you pick up boxes that are in the way... My parents taught me this: be aware of everything. When creating musical projects, I've always had a holistic view. I don't look at the project solely from the perspective of "I am the creator and others do." I also make sure there's nothing on stage before starting, and that comes a lot from my mother, who was in charge of the shop's displays. At the same time, the concept of sales: being aware that one thing is to make a product and another is to sell it.

Creativity is not exclusive to artists.

— Yes. My brother, who now runs the shop, puts a lot of emphasis on wine culture. He has given an interesting twist to bulk wine: he has stainless steel tanks inside the shop itself with wine that some important wineries from Penedès provide him. People can go to get this wine knowing that it is from such and such a winery, that it will be more economical for them than buying a bottle, but that it will be of the same quality. It connects with today's consumer, who seeks to live an experience and likes to know what story is behind the wine.

Does it happen to you too?

— Once I bought a bottle, partly because of the label. My brother told me the whole story of the winery and when I arrived at the home of the people for whom the gift was intended, they told me: "This drawing was made by Ricard's father [Parera, drummer for Anna Roig i L'Ombre de Ton Chien]". Perhaps that's why the bottle caught my attention; it had something familiar that attracted me. For once, I finished rounding off the story for my brother.

The tags…

— When I'm looking for a gift for someone, I take a walk around the shop and look for the label to tell me a story. I remember I gave a gift to Jordi Casanovas, the theater director who directed my last show: a wine called La Casilla d'en Pep, and his son is called Pep...

Gifts that seem tailor-made.

— Although sometimes I mess up [laughs]. I wanted to give Lluís Gavaldà a cava and it turns out he doesn't like it. When Els Pets released the album Brut Natural, everyone was giving them cava.

In an episode of Cercant la bellesa (3Cat), precisely with Lluís Gavaldà, they spoke about the anxieties of artistic life.

— In 2016, I suddenly realized that I had entered a cycle without considering why I was doing things. I decided to end a relationship, and my musical project was also faltering because one of the musicians had moved to Brazil. The problem isn't the music industry, but how you experience it. How you unwittingly get into a cycle of something and don't consider that perhaps things can be done differently. The hardest moment is when you know what you don't want but don't know where you're going. That's when anxieties arise: the things you've been putting under the rug become visible so you can heal them.

How did it turn out?

— You have to be very patient with yourself and trust that you are heading somewhere, even if you don't know where.

Was there a moment of clicking?

— A concert by Àlex Cassanyes. I told myself: "What Àlex is doing here is bringing beauty to the world." Suddenly I understood that this was the reason for making music, not to see if I win an award or how many followers I have.

It is nice that the reflection came from going out into the world.

— I called it "healing sound bath". At that time, the stage scared me. Suddenly, I was the audience and I saw that the person on stage was doing it from a very natural point of view, with contemporary music full of textures, and I felt something entering and vibrating... It reminds you of what is essential. And you say: "I can do it too". I proposed to Àlex that we do a project together: La tendresse, covering French songs. It was my return to the stage, and now I haven't stopped.

He is preparing a new album. What will it be like?

— Instrumentally, I want to move towards something else. Now that the project is Anna Roig solo, I'm taking the opportunity to experiment, but I'm continuing with themes of personal reflection and inner work, which is something that never ends. These past few years have taught me a lot about looking at myself in nature: trusting that things will eventually bloom, that everything has to go through a winter period so that it can bloom afterwards.