I could not live without the guitar, but at the same time this is no way of life, because it is such a difficult instrument, so ungrateful; you dedicate your whole life to it, hours and days, and suddenly you come up on stage, and that day you feel in perfect shape for playing, and still you don't hit one single string right, and you cannot figure out why... it depends on so many things, on how long your fingernails are... I am talking about tenths of millimeters, and you ask yourself. What is going on? Where am I failing? And it could be a badly polished nail... it's a f*cker of an instrument. Once I was drunk, in New York, and I went up on stage in a jazz club to play the electric guitar, and when I got down my nails were all broken by the steel strings ...and now ...never again.
When I was twenty years old I thought that when I would reach the age of fifty I would find peace of mind, but each day I am more confused, more lost, as your knowledge span is broadened you feel more insecure, you see that everything is relative and that you know less of everything; now I miss that age of twenty when I really felt like Superman and thought that I had everything.
Everything that one lives fills one with sensations, the pain when it is at its most profound...makes your sensibility get used to pain being so deep, and thus the happiness is also felt at its deepest. In some way there is a relationship between what you compose, what you write or play, the things through which you have felt; if you have felt a very deep pain, that is somehow reproduced when you compose. Flamenco is full of this, of pain, of sorrow, of the persecution of the gypsy people, the condion of being left out, Andalucia and poverty, and of hunger.
There are many people who boast of having endured hunger, but I did not suffer hunger, my father made sure that we would not go hungry, but we had just enough to live, and that is positive for any artist.
Whatever you choose to work in, we are in a society in which the levels, the standards have been set so high, that if you really want to become someone you have to become something as horrible as is being specialized in an area and dedicating your life to this; get locked up in a room to strain your brains, to try to reach the highest level possible.
This is basically a guitar album, a flamenco album in the traditional manner but with percussion, a lute here or there, a mandolin...Antonio Carmona plays the "cajon" in a buleria; in my opinion Antonio is the one who plays the "cajon" best of all... there is also Tino di Geraldo, Benavent and a Duquende, a cantaor whom I like very much and who did some very beautiful tangos.
I don’t know if this is the ¨most¨ deeply felt album... it is deeply felt because each album is a very painful delivery. Every time I record an album I truly go crazy, I am filled with anxiety, fear and insecurity, and I always think that it is worthless and throw more than half the compositions in the trash...it becomes an illness, recording an album becomes an illness, I suffer terribly.. suddenly I come up with a line that I enjoy thoroughly and for five minutes I can be the happiest person in the world, but after those five minutes insecurity and fear and uncertainty come back. What am I doing here when I could be enjoying the sunshine of the beach? I have enough money so as to not need to be straining my brain any more, but there comes a time in which I tell myself that I have to keep fighting and struggling to stay alive, so that I feel that I am still alive and with something to say.
Now I am left with the satisfaction that within the next two or three years, at least...I don’t have to lock myself up to record another album.
I could not live without the guitar, but at the same time this is no way of life, because it is such a difficult instrument, so ungrateful; you dedicate your whole life to it, hours and days, and suddenly you come up on stage, and that day you feel in perfect shape for playing, and still you don’t hit one single string right, and you cannot figure out why... it depends on so many things, on how long your fingernails are... I am talking about tenths of millimeters, and you ask yourself. What is going on? Where am I failing? And it could be a badly polished nail... it’s a fucker of an instrument.
Once I was drunk, in New York, and I went up on stage in a jazz club to play the electric guitar, and when I got down my nails were all broken by the steel strings ...and now ...never again.
I am not interested in it, there is still a lot to be done with the Spanish guitar.
Playing the electric guitar is interesting, because with the acoustic you play a note and it fades out almost immediately, while with the electric you can spend ten minutes with that same note, and that means that it gives you much more tranquility to play, while that note is sounding you have time to think about what you will do next...with the Spanish one you have to play the next note immediately, because the sound goes mute much faster.
I find this much more difficult.
I don’t have a good relationship with the guitar; as an instrument, it’s got an ugly character, I can truly say that I dislike it.
We flamenco guitar players are not very good in expressing ourselves with words, because we are a bit savage, we are people who have been brought up in a room, locked in, alone, without talking, we do not have a facility of speech. If you lend me a guitar I can stay here until tomorrow telling you things, but I am not used to expressing myself with words. I envy my friend Felix Grande. When I listen to him speak it is the thing which I most admire in the world, possessing eloquence, having wit in telling something. I have spent over half my life playing an instrument to be able to tell something, when I feel secure to some extent is when I have a guitar in my hands.
Flamenco has always been considered a third category type of music, and maybe I am placing it too highly at that. It was always the music of the gypsies, of Andalucians, of the people of the pubs. Something which can summarize this well is a memory of someone who once said in my village, "Paco de Lucia is really a master, he plays the guitar extremely well", and another one of my neighbors who was there retorted, "what are you saying, man, he cannot play so well, I know him since he was a child, and he even came to my house to eat and his head was full of spots". What I mean by this is that people have the sense that that which is ours is worthless, this happens here and in any other country, that which is local, folkloric, is not valued; it is cooler to go to a rock concert, no matter how bad it is, than to go see a guy that plays the ¨charango¨ (small South American guitar), which is marvellous.
I have played abroad since I was twelve years old, and in a way you open the doors for the people who are up and coming; here (in Spain) there is not work enough for all the good artists within the flamenco scene, because there are wonderful people, people who are making music that no one else can do in the whole country, not like those singers and little groups that do awful things and sell 500,000 copies of their first album, while another young guy has been suffering for years to gain enough to live, even though what he does is of a much higher quality.
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