“Maybe I’m an old man, but I see the world and I think we’re going backwards.”
Although we saw him work with Maria Rodes in 2021 (“With you”), continue to be a recurring piece in the studio and live with The Well Beloved and even produce the second job of Rachid B (“The Ghorba”25), we missed David Rodriguez in its purest format. Eight years after his previous job as The Star of Davidthe Catalan singer-songwriter marks a manual “back to basics” with “Maximum” (Sonido Muchacho, 26), his most succinct and frontal journey.
The first thing we do to David is to reproach him for keeping us on our toes since “Consecration” (18). “I would release more albums, but the screwed thing with my age is that I still want to make them,” he admits with his characteristic sarcasm. “It’s not that we don’t know how to do them, it’s not that difficult either; the difficult thing, as I tell you, is finding the motivation.” For “Maximum”However, inspiration and nerve flowed at the same time, settling his bill in just three months. “We started in September and in December we already had everything done. Frankly, my goal was to finish as soon as possible and without overheating the pot. I remember that we did about two songs a week, we were going at full speed, especially because we were using a very basic formula of guitars, bass and drums. We haven’t eaten much of the coconut, no.”
He speaks in plural because, once again, David has had Sergio Pérez in the studio, who has now officially become one of the shining stars of this star. “Of course I don’t mind repeating gestures. Sergio has a tremendous ability to make things that sound terrible end up being great, so, even if it’s just for that reason, I will always continue to have full confidence in him.” And he’s not the only usual suspect on his record returning to the recipe (in fact, there are several).
Also, as is tradition, there is once again a song on the album (just as there was in his previous project with “The Protest Song”) written by Luis Troquel (screenwriter, composer, journalist and cultural orchestra man). “He is a very good lyricist and we are also good friends. We laugh at the same jokes and we are both equally hurt,” he tells us about Troquel’s proposal to reverse his classic “Cariño” until it becomes the Galdosian “Cariño madrileño.”
“Frankly, my goal was to finish as soon as possible and without overheating the pot. I remember that we did about two songs a week, we went to the pinion”
And despite that methodical indifference with which he describes his work, “Maximum” hides in its lyrical depths a good handful of reasons to believe that the best David and his infamous way of observing the world are still there. Madrid, and specifically growing old there, is one of the many transversal themes of the LP, the result of his more than ten years residing in the capital. “Nowadays, even so many years later, I am strangely surprised to realize that I am growing old in Madrid. It is something I never thought would happen.” Now he is haunted by the dichotomy of knowing whether it is the city that has changed or him, a fight that he prefers to leave at a stalemate. “Maybe I’m an old man, but I see the world and I think we’re going backwards. A few years ago I moved away from the Madrid ointment and now I live in the Hortaleza neighborhood, but every time I have to go downtown for something, it’s a horror. But hey, the whole world is like this, huh. Barcelona is another fucking shit, and even my town, Sant Feliu, is another big one. Before I felt almost like an exile, but now I think the strange thing is to feel like we belong somewhere.”
Love, or rather its absence, once again becomes the recurring and quintessential theme in David’s story, who by now is extremely skilled at singing about both euphoria and the setbacks of the heart. “I like both songs that talk about the exaltation of love and those that talk about being screwed, the problem is that for a while now I’ve only gotten the latter,” he comments with a laugh, while citing “I want to fall in love with you” or “It’s for us” as empirical evidence. “Now my body asks me to write about how hard it is to believe in love at certain ages. I have always been a very person in love, but today it is really hard for me to come back to these things.”
“Every time I have to go downtown for something, it’s a complete horror. But hey, the whole world is like this, eh. Barcelona is another fucking shit, and even my town, Sant Feliu, is another big one.”
“Maximum” It also has the peculiarity of arriving just when two decades have passed since the eponymous debut of The Star of David. “Twenty years now and I haven’t sold a single broom,” he says jokingly. But what that album certainly did do was normalize a very free way of making pop in Spanish, offering us an aesthetic indebted to the starkest chanson and twisted rumba that would end up influencing so many of his contemporaries and contributing to magnify the second great wave of our national indie. “From that moment I would recover many things, without a doubt. I was much crazier and more unconscious when it came to making music. Now it’s not that I’m too obsessed with my songs sounding precisely super-balanced, but I do miss giving a shit about the formal factor. I wouldn’t mind recovering that and the faith in love, but I don’t know which of the two things is more complicated.”
Fran Gonzalez
