Spanish
Mexico City, June 15 (EFE).- Mexican singer and songwriter Leonel García expressed his concern this Sunday about the rise of narcocorridos and corridos tumbados in Mexico, stating that they "reflect a part of Mexican reality, a very visible part."
"Art is definitely telling us all the time what's happening in society, where we have a red flag that we need to address," the singer said in an interview with EFE during the presentation of his new album 'El Show'.
"The debate that is now taking place goes further, it is directed towards (...) exalting or being an ally of a social reality," explained Garcia about the controversy surrounding the Mexican musical genre that glorifies drug trafficking and violence, songs that were criticized by the Mexican president, Claudia Sheinbaum.
Composer Career
As a composer, the member of the group Sin Bandera is one of the most important figures in Mexican ballads with lyrics performed by artists such as Alejandro Fernández, Carlos Rivera, Gloria Trevi or Ana Torroja, reaching figures of 817 million streams on Spotify, with the hit 'La Raíz', by Natalia Lafourcade. He explained that since he was a child he wrote songs, and that at the age of 16 he discovered what the figure of the composer was and thought: "I mean, I don't have to sing them myself, but someone else can sing them and they pay you." Since then, songs like 'Me dediqué a perderte' or 'Te voy a perder' by Alejandro Fernández have broken geographical barriers and have become anthems of the ballad of the country. "Most of the times I've tried to send songs to an artist to sing, they don't sing them. Rather, I think people fall in love with the songs and find them and say, 'This song is for me and I want to record it,'" García said. The Mexican stated that he has never regretted that the songs he has composed found a voice that was not his own. "I believe things happen naturally. It would be ungrateful to want to think in retrospect." Regarding the evolution of music since the first release of the group he forms with the Argentinian Noel Schajris in the year 2000, he lamented that "it has changed a lot" and that before, musical consumption "was, to a certain extent, romantic." 'The Show': a record like the old ones "An album is the portrait of a moment in a person's life, it's a few months of their life, a year of work from composition to the end of production. That document represents that period of time," explained Leonel in relation to his new album. His latest release, 'El show', with collaborations from Lafourcade, Ivana, Edén Muñoz and Arath Herce, was recorded live "resisting a bit" the musical trend of programming and trying to "allow people to experience listening to an album recorded live". He stated that the way of making music has changed and compares it to the process of cooking. "As a child, I ate paella and it was delicious, but it takes a long time to prepare, it's very difficult, it's very complicated. So we're going to remove it from the menu," he quipped with a laugh. "I don't want people to miss the opportunity to hear those kinds of more complex, more difficult recipes."
