Uruguayan composer and singer, winner of an Oscar (2005), five Latin Grammy’s (2014, 2018) and a Goya (2011), among other awards. Jorge Drexler is this week’s Black Box guest.” I am a very fortunate person in terms of the people around me who inspire me. Since I was a child I have a very strong and very direct relationship with a cousin of my age, the daughter of my mother’s sister, Alejandra Melfo Prada. We have been friends since we were children. And she and her family went into exile in Venezuela in the ’70s. His parents were left-wing teachers and teachers who in the dictatorship were dismissed and had to come to live at home. Suddenly, the family was like huge for a few years. For us, beyond the tragedy that should be for adults, it was paradise, because we were a lot of children, all super happy all the time, oblivious to the catastrophe that happened in the lives of adults and until they went to live in Venezuela. She loves Venezuela, she is the only one in my family left living in Venezuela. He did not want to leave his university in Merida. And although we stopped seeing each other for many years, as happens with those true and deep friendships that are forged when you are a child, when we met again we had the same hard drive back. So, the last great discovery is that there is like a kind of gene in the family of verse and writing and delirium and imagination that she developed on her own and I developed it on my own,” said the artist.
In addition to being a renowned musician, Jorge Drexler is a doctor: “What I considered a defect of my whole life, having lost time in the Faculty of Medicine ten years and having begun to live on music at 30 recently. That I started to do well at 40 just … But then I realized that this was my prism, my identity and that’s why everything is transformed. And these are the same song, in short. Sometimes there are people who say I write about the same thing… well, it’s very likely that it is. What happens is that I look for different perspectives and in the end, between the two, between science and poetry, I was accumulating a series of vices that could be identities.” One of the good things about getting old is that you see how the cycles are repeated, and how the concept of “the new” is changing, “said the artist about the passage of time and regarding the phobia of the new. The Uruguayan artist won an Oscar and revealed where he has it on display: “I have it in a showcase in the place where I work. Recently I covered it because people came in and your eyes were going there, you saw… I’m proud, but I don’t want that to center the conversation.”
If we go to the black box of his life, what was the moment that made him Jorge Drexler?: “There is a moment that also happened in this city that I would like to say, there are many in life, but there is one that I would like to highlight because it was very important for me in this city that was when I took out my first cassetito. A journalist came to me to make a note and told me that he was going to interview Pedro Aznar and Adriana Varela. Then I said ‘take a cassette to each one’ and both Adriana and Pedro received me with a affection that I did not know. In my environment I was a complete outsider in Uruguay, I was still working as a doctor. And I remember one afternoon in Pedro Aznar’s studio and I was treated like an artist for the first time in my life, and by a guy like Pedro Aznar, that I had all the records. That moment, when I got out of there, I said, ‘I think I’ve seen a light on the other side of life.’ Like there’s a chance to be considered a person who works in the creative world.” Towards the end of the interview the black box opens. An unexpected challenge begins. Week after week a figure will submit to the living room to dialogue and reflect. And you, do you dare to remember what moment made a click in your life?
