Ely Guerra: Lyrics and Music

ELY GUERRA: LYRICS AND MUSIC

She is an unusual artist. Although it is beautiful, her success does not lie on her beauty and she changes her look drastically. She has not let anyone manage her career. She left her record companies and formed one herself, with which she has recently released her first independent album, “Hombre Invisible” Invisible Man, which can only be purchased electronically.

By: Juliet García González. GATOPARDO Magazine February, 2010

The first time I saw Ely Guerra was at a wedding. María Urtusuástegui, who then sang with Aleks Syntek and was the best friend of the bride, was standing behind a microphone. These guests assumed she would sing because she normally did it in reunions when the guests request her to do so, because they really liked her clear and deep voice. That day she was there with a companion (a singing colleague) standing behind her.

Her colleague looked like a shy girl, ashamed, it seemed like she had never appeared in public. Instead of singing, María handed the microphone to the girl. The girl difficultly waved, very modestly, she smiled at people who were drinking and celebrating and who were in the middle of a noisy twittering. Then she closed her eyes and started intonating. There was a stunning and real silence: the person there behind the microphone was a singer, a true singer. The shyness was gone. The ashamed gestures disappeared and only a woman with a voice remained.

That was more than a decade ago. By then, she had not experienced all the possible chances with her hair, she had not played to look like Rarotonga character, and she did not have an own production company. She was not sweet and sour at the same time, she hadn´t been cold but privately nor she hadn’t play with invisible men. Ely Guerra was still gestating.

Written

The journalism is something sui generis in this country, the least one can say. The same happens with the artwork. Perhaps it is a condition of both activities and the country where they are developed has nothing to do with it. Let this brief reflection serve almost as an excuse: I must confess that Ely and I got together for the preparation of this article. We could not agree on what I consider the particularities of our occupations, or maybe because fate wouldn’t want it that way. However, we were in constant contact. Ely was about to leave for trip, I was stuck into a thousand troubles and the realization of the appointment never happened. So, we decided to do the interview via email.

Physical interviews have some advantages: you can see the small gestures of the interviewee, their habits, the actual color of their eyes and whether or not they have dyed hair (and how touched up are the roots, for example). The electronic interviews have other virtues, especially considering the huge layers of information coming from writing. The words have an important weigh, they were chosen more carefully than when there is a tape recorder in front of your mouth.

For this case, writing had an even greater weight. Question 12 is the briefest answer: "As a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?" "Ely: A writer."

Hombre Invisible, Invisible Man (Homey Records, 2009) shares with the singer's last albums a fundamental condition: It is said both in lyrics and in the music. In an interview with People Magazine in Spanish, just before the introduction of this new company, Ely said: "My fans read my lyrics. They communicate through my songs". Therefore, what she writes is part of an ongoing dialogue between herself and others, the most radical difference between "La Guerra" as she calls herself, and other current singers is the basic attention put to the words. Each phase, each noun, the overturning of intention the adjectives provide, they become key factors to continue with the complicity forged over time. Anyone wanting to know what happens with Ely Guerra, simply has to dive into her lyrics.

This is a recurrent phrase among contemporary artists: if you want to know who I am, check out my production. This is not only common for those who make music, but also actors, directors, painters ... Those who create, invite you to review their work almost automatically because they know that we believe it is the purest product coming from deep down inside. Freud said that every dream is the fulfillment of an unconscious fantasy and he applied this theory to interpret art. The audience has become accustomed to seeing art as an expression of the unconsciousness of the author.

The increasingly persistent demands for the artists to bare (literally or metaphorically) to really know their fantasies and desires has drawn the line between what they can offer and what they are. Perhaps this is related to the type of available creation or entertainment: it is difficult to really find out what the falsetto of an actor on stage means, the abrupt traces on a canvas, or the vibrato of an instrument.

All of this is a matter of interpretation. Of course, that is partly the aim.

But something else happens to writing: the words are there, with specific meanings. And the interpretation must first pass through the understanding, through apprehension. It is a more complex exercise requiring readers or listeners to participate more actively. The following summarizes the value that the interviewee gives the writing: "What are you a fan of?" Ely: "I am fan of anyone who knows how to tell stories with extensive vocabulary and good spelling."

Good ear "His strength relies on not saying too much and being a poet", this is how "Ángel de fuego", Angel of fire, starts, from her Pa’morisse de amor production in 1997. Being a poet? Ely began to have a significant presence in the show business because her music, superficially more worked up and less deeply carved echoed on the end of the millennium ghosts. The songs had titles like "Lágrimas de agua salada, Tears of saltwater" or "Los Milagros, The Miracles" and they seemed to presage what was coming just a couple of years later.

Lotofire (1999) was a radical tone change and she pointed out the way on which the northern singer (from Monterrey, San Luis Potosi, Guadalajara Mexico and now from Coyoacán) would walk the following decade. To start with, the title advertised the game of words with which Guerra is delighted, not just as a symbol for her discography, but as the very shape of her songs. A lotus flower and fire, or the fire of the lotus ... it is just the same. It is an illusion working as an excuse to once again force the audience to pay more attention. "Tengo frío, I'm cold" is perhaps the most recognizable single in that album. In the video, Ely is dressed (but not much, as my grandmother would say) and lying on the shallow bed of a river. The water runs down on her shoulders, she is soaked and, evidently, it makes her feel cold. The obvious images contrasts with double lyrics, of shadows: "Y tomo cuenta de los días /Nadie… nadie puede ver / Si tengo miedo, si llevo alguna herida / La idea es que vengas a mí. And I take account of the days/Nobody... nobody can see/I'm afraid indeed, I do have a wound/The idea is that you come to me".

"I'm a good ear," Ely says in this questionnaire-interview. "Do you know how? It's simple, I'm interested in other people’s life experiences, I like to give them my opinion, I find it important to preserve the closeness through a frank conversation... I'm not there every day, I am definitely not, but if you ask me to listen to you, I will, and you'll be helping to be part of your life and I will surely tell you mine. The daily acts nourish my lyrics and my music, as well as my solitary condition...".

She is a good ear and she knows how to empty what enters in her. Readers, please note that what I have done is nothing but literal transcript of Guerra’s words. I don’t feel it as a coincidence that we've established a written relationship anymore. Being good ear is very useful for those who want to retransmit the words they have heard, transforming them after taking them. Ely's discography gives the impression of being just that: a work of appropriation and distillation. In various interviews, the singer has spoken about the processes that have taken her to consolidate her productions. From the desire or fantasy of love Sweet & Sour, Hot y Spicy (2004) emerged; from the need to fly over the negative and to experience, Lotofire, etcetera. We can tell that Ely Guerra Album (1992) sounds like the shyness of someone leaving adolescence behind and Pa' morise de amor has the intensity of someone who is 25. Hombre Invisible is an album with more content, more rhythmic, with compositions that are heard better cared. There is an obvious labor of setting, filter and reflection, too.

Finally, the ability to listen is perfected, on someone who really has it, over time.

The greater freedom and the extreme anguish Her albums have common denominators (the artist and his work are innate, Freud dixit), but they are also chameleonlike. Nobody remains unique and unchanged over time and that is very evident on Ely, or she makes it very obvious. To begin with her look.

She's very pretty, sensual woman with an enviable body, full of energy. The videos and photographs show her as an expert on her body. She has this unusual beauty of someone who can be interchangeably called "pretty", "attractive" or "sexy". It also has something a bit unusual: she constantly plays with her look, without clinging on an image with the one she feels safe. Those who have interviewed her or reviewed her albums and videos often interpret these radical changes as a clear warning that there is something new going through the mind of the author. They could be read as a warning to whoever has the bad idea of ignoring the lyrics of her songs.

For Lotofire Album, the singer was wearing a very short hair style, almost cropped, her platinum-blond contrasted sharply with her eyebrows, eyelashes and dark eyes. This image showed off her (so turned- up) nose, and a long elegant neck. During the time of Sweet & Sour, she was wearing a very fluffy afro hair style, she wore flowers on her ear from tome to time (the cover of that album inevitably takes me back to Rarotonga’s comic images). Between these points, she has passed through Mary Pickford´s hairstyle, a messy but common hairstyle, spiky and irredeemable hair, with gentle waves covering her forehead (sometimes dark, sometimes light). She receives Hombre Invisible with a pair of brown braids and a picked locked at the height of the crown: a little unconventional style, less provocative, however.

Given such a profusion of looks and the constant interpretation of them, I ask her about the issue. What about her image? Does she know herself pretty or sexy? Does she pay the attention that we suppose?

I quote: "Ely: I can say that I am insecure. The stage is my greatest freedom and also my extreme anguish. Stepping ecstatic out of the stage, full and satisfied, makes me feel shame... (Why did I throw myself to the floor? Look at your knees! Why did you say that to all those people? That wasn’t right! Why did you cry in that song? Why are you like that?) Then, after all these doubts there is no 'sexiness', one even feels far from this world and its traditions, ways, forms of seduction between men and women. The private things was made public when I sang my songs and I feel I am nude in front of the others ... Anyone who lives simple would say complexity, or someone who simply lives? It can be said that she is "pretty", "attractive" she’s got something unusual: she plays with an image that makes her feel safe.

"I work every day. That’s my way of reaching goals, of returning to my team and family who are very fond of me, and so approach to excellence. My ability to overcome these very personal moments allow me to me to recognize that this is it, that success demands a hard crust, resistance, education and love, that makes me feel sexy in everyday life.

Communion As I write this note, Ely is prepared with luggage ready to reach some destination in the world. And when we are ready to go to the printer’s, this destination will be the Southern Cone. She will arrive there to display her Invisible Man in the Argentine summer. I know she doesn’t stop coming and going. Many of his albums have been produced or recorded abroad. We must add the presence on stage. This involves arriving to a place, staging the show, rehearsing, performing songs at a site and 80 kilometers later repeating them all over.

It is clear that this is how she has designed her life, but I also believe it is a challenge to a certain extent because I guess a great and diverse show is expected from her every time. I think on the women of the U.S. entertainment and that those shows are a showcase for demonstrations that have little to do with art and a lot with exhibition (of the body, special effects ...).

This notion of entertainment takes me to ask Ely: What does she consider herself to be above everything else: a singer, a musician or an entertainer in the sense of show given to the term. Transcription: "Ely: [...] I have not always been to the place I love to be when I share my songs. On tours where you go from an unknown place to another one even more unknown, people do not perceive you, you're a mere entertainer, as you mention it..., but I never got to be a mere entertainer: I refuse to be one... once on stage at that hidden place, I sing in a low voice, or just keep silent, I drink my whiskey and ask things like, 'Can you shut up?'. I guess I immediately become the worst of the 'entertainers', because I assume that you have to be amusing to amuse others,... not my case, I take my participation very seriously in this in this modern world in which we live in".

The glamorous idea of a recognized artist is usually different to what Guerra shows in her answer. There is another one that will help understanding herself better. When I asked what she liked the most about the whole process from the beginning to the end, she replies: "Ely: I like it when the stage is filled with light and on the outside there is a mirror to look at yourself... an audience that allows sharing music is the best part of this lonely process."

This is, the height of her work is an act of communion, not the shining, the possibility of exotic costumes, traveling to remote sites or the collective fantasy of fame.

This conviction- the one of an individual work which is made to be given to the world- must not be something easy inside the music industry. For those who do that for a living, it is not an opportune moment. Internet and all of its possibilities, piracy and hard competition have been the bogeyman for record companies in the past few years. The investment of an artist is very high and it is difficult to estimate what the profit would be. I guess that has required strict rules, and I can easily imagine these big companies trying to bring at all levels the orders of some strategic planning made for the administrative areas, cutting down costs here and there, reducing their people a little of everything. What I find difficult to picture is Ely Guerra yield to it. Of course, I am taking advantage of the information I have: the singer-songwriter has quit the record companies because she doesn’t get on well with them at the moment and she has founded her own, Homey Records. The Hombre Invisible Album was launched at www.mapamondo.com for those intending to buy and it is sold at Oxxo stores at a real bargain price. You can also download it directly from Ely’s web site (www.elyguerra.com). ON top of that, there's a link to follow her through all possible electronic media: Twitter, MySpace, Facebook... Of course, there were teasers of the album on YouTube that were duplicated like mushrooms all over the site.

No, in this and other senses, Ely Guerra is not common for the media.

Discipline, imagination and more words

The first question I asked her was: "How do you make music? Could you briefly describe the process? "I quote her reply:" Ely: When I write my songs there are many similar dynamics. I tend to be a killer, indeed. I mean, I wear myself out, I lose concentrations ... I get distracted with an alternate imagination, paying attention almost requires a school discipline. It is common (for me) to escape to other spaces where the imagination has a better place [...] Make songs allows me to sleep, I never sleep well when bedtime comes, but negotiating with the fact of writing a song gets me tired and I can sleep ... I sleep with my guitar over my belly, my body languishes and I lie on my back, I curl my guitar on my belly and I play the notes, I write the words, I memorize the melodies ... that’s how I write my songs, almost against myself , almost by force... ".

The Homey Records Team, founded last year, sent me two basic materials so I could write this piece: a portrait and a biography. I suspect the hand of Ely herself has been largely responsible for what in both documents appears. The biography is divided into segments, each one with a title: "I see myself, I see you, a compass is not necessary", "Never the same, not invisible, just ... different", "In the absolute enjoyment", "Telling telling ... "and so on. The narrative, somehow unorthodox, leads us down the path of Guerra’s personal discovery. In the first part you read how "she found refuge and warmth in the writing of personal statements" and how she discovered the power and accurate intonation of her voice. "This document tells the story of the daughter of a soccer coach and a model who found out at age nine that she was already able to write a song, that she had something to say and she knew how to do it.

Hombre Invisible was achieved as it follows: Ely requested some men with whom she wanted to work a collaboration, it was like writing a wish and throwing it to the sea in a bottle. She recently said about her project: "I did not visit any dressing room or I did any inappropriate approach. I invited all the Invisible men to participate through a letter. It was a long-distance collaboration". And what was expected from them? "A piano sequence, some guitar chords" to be taken up again and like words, to be transformed into something unique and personal.

The guests are a motley range: from Gustavo Santaolalla to Horacio Franco, going to Gil Cerezo, Bunbury and her own band, the Elys Guerras.

Outside the comfort zone Since the state of our country is one of my abiding concerns, I take the matter to the interview. So I ask Ely what she thinks of Mexico, today. She says, 'I know that mean what I think about our country and its sphere nowadays, but I would like to take advantage of this game of words to get in the following context. [...] We like to look outside rather than looking inwards and we definitely prefer 'to worship other gods' before our own. We Mexicans fail in EDUCATION. My opinion of us as Mexicans has to do with [...] the little pleasure we find at the individual enrichment as a standard of excellence. What do I think of what happens in our country nowadays in terms of ecology, politics, health, culture and everything that surrounds this question in general? That everything refers to the poor education we demand and we give ourselves as Mexicans. That our country cries out its greatness and we accept its generosity from a comfort zone that, in my opinion, stands out our mediocrity [...]. "

The rigor that exhausts her on the production of her songs, the idea of excellence that separates her from the conventional record company, the creative autonomy that leads her to seek what she is really interested in through letters is something that she extends to others. We must move out from the comfort zone, be educated, enrich oneself, change, leave behind the comfort of mediocrity. Do as you know how: with words, with music, with the available tools for everyone.

Ely Guerra

But beyond the creation, what is Ely Guerra like? I offer here a few excerpts of her answers:

What delights you? Ely: "I am delighted when I write notes on pretty paper, although I love to have a pile of nice papers at the warehouse, only mine. [...] I am delighted when I spend a night with my friends talking about nothing. I am delighted with a daring suitor... "

Is there anything you are eagerly expecting, something that provokes recurring emotion? Ely: "[...] I look forward to my next albums ... Love is a recurrent form of emotion to me."

What makes you nervous? Ely: "Going out on stage, those previous moments to the concert when I am backstage ready to sing. It makes me nervous someone knocking on my door if I am not expecting anyone. I get nervous when talking on the phone with the guy I like. [...] I get nervous when I feel I have forgotten something. I get nervous when my hair is not done the way I want it. I get nervous when I see my ass is growing. I get nervous about the climate change and the next water shortage. This ignorance of mine gets me nervous".

Only someone who understands the value of information and the knowledge riddles may feel nervous before his own emptiness. And it is often the authors, the authentic artists, those who achieve that understanding.//