When recently I was talking about Santiago Feli\u00fa with some friends, I told them that gradually, surprising and sadly, I have stopped liking him. There are songs of him that once broke my soul and now I no longer swallow. With Carlos Varela it has been happening more or less the other way around. My relationship with him has been this: ignorance \/ discovery-shock-adolescent love \/ boredom \/ forgetfulness \/ rebirth.<\/p>\n
I burned it at the age we all did, but so much that I got bored really quickly. Perhaps it was because I found the self-assurance, the heresy, the wooden face of Sabina, quite the opposite of what The Gnome is: a serious, mournful, Irish Catholic with shadows, who is serious, who costs him sarcasm . So I should have said: \"it's over there and not here.\" Or maybe it was the silly \u2014 but natural for the pubescent snob that I was \u2014 habit of straying as far as I could from what the majority was listening to, a habit that gave me a lot, but took as much from me. There is an age when you are not ready to see the coolest in the classroom singing Like an Angel and say that you like him too. No way! He'll have some poison to make that illiterate idiot funny. Therefore, I pass. Life does not give you those primitive definitions again later, that is why adolescence is the most beautiful age.<\/p>\n
Every time I listen to this album, time returns me to Varela just out of the shower, smelly and talcum, especially the lyricist, and this word goes without synonyms.<\/p>\n
It is a mistake to think that singer-songwriters have to be poets. Although, what the hell is being a poet, right? But I say it thinking that perhaps I went with the rag in the past when I looked for more elaborate images in Carlitos like Silvio's, or as elegant, as erudite impostor as Sabina's, assuming that the troubadours had to be necessarily great illusionists of words who also knew how to sing and play the guitar. There are, of course, but it is not a sine qua non to categorize as a singer-songwriter. When you don't ask Varela to be Leonard Cohen, then you realize that as a lyricist he is at a very high level. Tell me obvious and old cunt, but I will repeat that the song is not a musicalized poem. The author of Hab\u00e1name is not a great poet (at least taking as a reference only the lyrical side of his songs, because when you come to see the guy is so crack that he has some very good poems stored in the drawer), but he doesn't need it, because he's an extraordinary, first-class song-maker.<\/p>\n