“With the first album, people were waiting for Manel again”

While everything happens too fast, Guillem Gisbert asks for calm, time and distance to write songs. In ““The lie detector” (Ceràmiques Guzmán, 26), Manel’s singer once again advances in his own way, without urgency or grand gestures, faithful to a look that turns the everyday into something extraordinary.

“Au, vinga, adéu”. Guillem Gisbert He grabs his hands behind his back and leaves. No hugs. Without fitting the hand. Just the “au, vinga, adéu”. And he leaves. Avinguda de la República Argentina is going upwards. Thinking about his moves. because with Guillem Gisberta contemporary version of Josep Pla who saw things, half grumpy, half endearing, endearingly grumpy, you always have that feeling that he is talking to you, but your head is somewhere else. Far or near, but in another place. It is not an extraordinary picture. If you are from the Vallcarca neighborhood, you have surely come across him more than once, walking, on one side or another, up or down the bridge, alone or dragging his son’s stroller. Thinking, guessing, mulling it over, perhaps looking for Teresa Rampell. Here, but there, in songs, in verses, in stanzas, in albums like “The lie detector”his second solo album.

“I made this album when I had a gap in my schedule.” It’s Thursday. Thursday at the beginning of October. There’s a long month left until Guillem Gisbert publish “The lie detector”. There is so much left – so much by the standards of a world in which everything moves so fast that four or five weeks are an eternity – that he has barely given an interview before ours. It is Thursday at the beginning of October, we said, we are in a cafeteria where noisy children wearing private school uniforms have a snack, and in a while Oques Grasses will give their second farewell concert at the Estadi Olímpic Lluís Companys in Barcelona. It should have been the first, but on Monday it rained, the Civil Protection alarms sounded, and the gig had to be postponed until today. Gisbert has tickets, but he won’t go. On Monday I could. For today he already had other plans that he has not been able to change. We have not asked them about it, but in the interview prior to ours they did question it. We all ask ourselves: How many Olympic stadiums would Manel have filled if they had wanted to do business when they decided to take some time? Pragmatic and empirical, he believes that, starting from a rule of three based on the fact that his drawing power found its ceiling in a room with five thousand paid tickets, none. Thus Manel, a band whose relevance will not be remembered by massive concerts but by a songbook, from the first album to the last, bordering on the pluquamperfect, left without hyperbolically emotional farewells. Neither holding hands nor hugs. “Au, vinga, adéu”. And each teacher to his own.

“To compose, I need there to be nothing, to know that I have no commitments to fulfill and to reduce my social life to a minimum”

sew and sing
We would have bet that Guillem Gisbert He would dedicate himself to literature, to write about the things he sees, but he decided to continue with music alone (and sing to us the things he sees, whether, as in the case of Josep Pla, real or fictitious). In 2024 he published “Balla la masurca!”an album that in content did not distance itself too much from Manel’s latest works, being the continent where he sought disruption. To redefine the brand, it was necessary to be influenced by new points of view. Different perspectives obtained by collaborating with a massive list of producers. There were eleven songs and nine sound architects: Jordi Casadesús, Anxo Ferreira, El Extintor (the tandem made up of David Soler and Marcel Bagés), Jake Aron, Joan Figueres and Andreu Galofré, Pau Esteve, Roger Cassola and Gabriel Bosch (these last four, members of La Ludwig Band). “One thing about being in a group is that you know few people. I have met many more people in the industry in the last three or four years than in the first fifteen of my career”. Then he turned. And when he finished dancing the mazurka live, he found time in his schedule to start writing his second full-length.

“When you publish an album, you spend a year and a half playing. During those months you have a lot of free time. From Monday to Wednesday you often have nothing to do. But, if you have performed on the weekend, you are tired. It is not a question of physical exhaustion. In my case, it is mental. To compose, I need there to be nothing, to know that I have no commitments to fulfill and to reduce my social life to a minimum.” It’s when Guillem Gisbert You have that peace of mind that the neural networks that drive your creative side get to work. “When I made the first album I doubted whether I would go through a phase of creativity again. But there is a time when the concerts are over, you can go back to enjoying the tranquility of being at home, listening to music and talking to people to whom you have not been able to dedicate time, and you reconnect with things. It is the preamble to a few months in which you focus almost exclusively on the composition. First you come up with four songs and, from there, everything is much easier. When you have been nine, making the tenth is like a cakewalk. The really difficult thing is doing the first two.”

Dad’s fears
Various philosophical schools and critical currents maintain that art is based on contradictions, defending that it is one of the few human tools capable of holding two opposing truths at the same time without collapsing. In this case, it is an irrelevant, trivial contradiction: that of finding the genesis of “The lie detector” not once the presentation tour of “Balla la masurca!”but on a sleepless night during confinement. A sleepless morning from which two songs were born: “Les aventures del general Lluna” and “Terraplanistes”. The first ended up on Gisbert’s first solo album; the second in a drawer, waiting for its moment as a creative instigator of “The lie detector.” “The main idea of ‘Les coses anaven bé’ is also a few years old. ‘Entreten-me’ is a year and a half from the first idea. The rest of the songs are a year old. There came a time when I had various bases and first verses of a few songs and what I did was work together and not individually. I spent a while with one and a while with another. It was a different process, in which there were moments when I felt that the songs were improving, and others in which “It frustrated me because no matter how many hours I put in, I couldn’t finish anything.”

That vision of the album as a whole has given it a homogeneity of sound that, at times, its first album lacked. That and having reduced the production team to two. “In ‘Balla la masurca!’ There were many producers and each one offered a different aesthetic proposal. In ‘El detector de mentides’ I have only worked with Arnau Grabulosa, who is part of my live band, and Pep Saula (leader of Sexenni, a band that recently announced its separation, and producer who has collaborated with names like Ginestà, The Tyets, Yung Rajola or Flashy Ice Cream), who joined the project for something as casual as being Grabu’s roommate. They came by our house, we watched football games, we talked about music and, in a totally organic way, we began to develop new songs.” Pieces like “Nocturn de tennis”, “Les coses anaven bé” or “Daddy Issues”, which, once again discovering us Guillem Gisbert as the putative son of David Byrne and Franco Battiato, they are among the most notable, if not excellent (“Daddy Issues” is one of those songs where you don’t dare breathe so as not to break it) in their repertoire. “With the first album, people were waiting for Manel again. Now there is no longer that doubt. It’s me alone and that’s it. It’s an album that I have made from tranquility and a certain calm, but maintaining that intention of continuing to move forward. Behind me, is all of Manel’s work, but for now I continue forward. I suppose there will come a day when I will stop, but that moment has not yet arrived.”

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