Jan Garrido: "Being fathers is very good for us men."

BarcelonaGiant, you have a giant heart / favorite creature / solar revolution / Giant, you have a giant heart / you make life tremble / small nuclear bomb. After six albums, Xiulaland, is a return to the origins, to the reason that made us meet, to the reasons why we do everything we do.

This that you were singing is Giant, one of the last songs.

— It's a special song that explains the love I feel for my son, a gigantic love, just as his heart is gigantic. I talk about that unconditional, absolutely immeasurable love that all fathers and mothers experience. And the enormous gratitude I feel for my partner, an enormous gratitude for my son, and also for myself for everything we're going through, which is beautiful.

Small nuclear bomb...

— A child blows everything up, explodes your life. The love you feel for them shakes everything to its foundations. It shakes your ego, the way you had understood life. It changes your patience, your presence. It's a miraculous shift. If you open yourself to this experience, you see how your ego bends thanks to the weight of so much love. And we experience an opportunity to heal some wounds from the past, to integrate them, to mature not theoretically, but deeply.

Tell me this about the firefighters.

— I have a good friend who works in the fire department and the idea of making a song together came up. Until now there was that song of the open shirt and the crooked mustachebut it didn't represent us very well in terms of values and we wanted to make another one that would be an informative tool to understand the work of firefighters, that would allow us to explain to children what to do if one day there's a fire at home, how important it is to close all the doors. The song is titled Firefighter and the protagonist is a girl, to escape the stereotype.

What have you had to rethink about becoming a father?

— Masculinity, for example. Having a son makes me reflect on how to be a man today. I've had to look at myself since, through my son, I am his male role model. I ask myself how I present myself in front of him. I've had to think about the male role models I had as a child and young man. I sometimes hear that no one teaches us how to be fathers, and from what I've experienced, I see that there's only one way. To learn to be a father, you have to be one. This means spending as much time as possible with your child, fostering the bond, the presence, and the capacity for care.

Do you still feel like a new dad?

— I learn a lot every day, and I still have a lot to learn. Fatherhood is a gift and a blessing, an opportunity to rethink who I am as a person. I'm experiencing that love in a way that's doing me a world of good. For men, being fathers is very good for us if we experience it firsthand. We must move beyond dopamine and testosterone, which men are well served by, and secrete more oxytocin, which is the oxytocin of tenderness, caring love, brotherly love.

What is the best time of day?

— Any. Any is the best, as long as you're fully present, with your phone on the other side of the house. Fully experiencing what you're experiencing generates many changes, generates many beautiful things.

Wow, I really like what you say.

— Sometimes I'm walking down the street with him, holding hands, and I feel a feeling of immense happiness, a tremendous inner joy just from being with him, without anything special happening. For me, this is the most special happiness, the most intense, the kind that doesn't need any external input. It makes me feel like the luckiest man in the world. And nothing happens. It's just that we're together. Feeling that we're good to each other.

Tell me about a moment you had with Bruno related to music.

— The first day he asked me what he wanted to listen to Vegetables and fish It's a song we wrote twelve or thirteen years ago. Who knows how many times we've sung it, how many times we've raised our hands, how many parties it's sparked, and so many wonderful things. And now, my three-year-old son tells me he wants to hear it, and I feel something inside that I can't explain. Life takes so many turns, right? There's something spiritual in all of this.