SIMPLY SIZZLING
Cuba brings stripped-down sound to town
When Alex Cuba began working on his fresh, summery and soulful sixth album, Lo Unico Constante, his only goal was to keep things simple.
“I knew from the moment I started working on the songs that the album wanted to be more acoustic,” said the artist born Alexis Puentes, in an interview from his home in Smithers, B.C. “And I knew that it wanted to be more spacious — I knew the songs were strong enough to hold themselves up with very little around them.”
As the album took shape, the more strongly he felt he was on the right track with the uncluttered approach, plus a title — “the one constant” — that gave him free reign. After all, he points out, change is the only constant in the universe.
“I knew this was going to be a different record. A new confidence was awakened in me that made me feel strong every minute I was working on it,” Puentes said, attributing some of that confidence to the fact that his previous album, Healer, not only earned a Latin Grammy award for the best singer-songwriter album, but was also nominated for a regular Grammy.
“Somehow it left something in me to keep believing in who I am.”
He also realized that his desire for musical simplicity was rooted in his childhood in Cuba. His guitar-playing father listened to a lot of “filin,” the jazz-influenced, romantic song movement that was popular in their country in the 1960s. The word is derived from “feeling.”
“What I got from just listening to my dad playing was the incredible amount of honesty. There’s no superficiality in the music,” Puentes says. “It’s so bare bones and so free that way. I guess that left a lifelong impression on me, and I thought these songs were strong enough to do that, to be bare bones.”
Most of the songs were written at home last summer. One exception is the irresistibly catchy Look What You Started, the album’s only number with an English chorus. It’s a co-write with Magic!, the Toronto pop-reggae band, that was born in Los Angeles around Grammy time last year.
Puentes ran into the guys from Magic! during a pre- Grammy party, and they made plans to write together the next day. They came up with three song ideas, which were put on the back burner until Puentes was at home going through material.
“I found it on my phone and it sparked something in me. ‘Whoa, I like this,’” he recalls. “It took a couple of weeks to finish the lyrics. It’s a very syncopated melody that was calling for a lot of monosyllables, which is kind of tricky in Spanish.”
Besides the Grammys, another highlight of last year was an epic road trip around Cuba to host a musical documentary entitled The Cuban Bus, produced by a Toronto-based company. Puentes and his “favourite” engineer, Victoria’s Joby Baker, brought six cases of recording gear and transformed the bus, a fire-engine red 1952 International, into a funky mobile studio. For 10 days, they travelled around the island discovering and recording artists.
Puentes says a lot of documentaries are being made on the island these days, but most filmmakers don’t venture out of Havana. “Most people don’t do something as crazy we did, travel the whole island,” he says. “It was the experience of a lifetime, I would say.”
The immediacy of the music they recorded also influenced his new album, to be released April 7. “The documentary is all about being real. It’s about who you are right now: ‘Sing something for me, and make me like it.’ That had something to do with what I came up with for my own album.”
After making a second trip to Cuba for Christmas, the artist has been reflecting on his “amazing journey” in Canada, which began when he moved to Victoria with his wife, who’s Canadian, in 1999. As his career blossomed and he was spending more time on the road, they decided to move to Smithers to be closer to her family. Their three children are now aged 20, 14 and 10.
Puentes was a bassist when he first came to Canada. Over the years, he discovered his singing voice, as well as a knack for writing songs.
“From the beginning, I had a very positive reaction to my music and the sound of my voice,” he says. “People almost didn’t care about language anymore when they heard my voice. It changed my life. It did something I wasn’t expecting at all: It turned me into a singersongwriter with a unique sound and a unique voice. Mine tells the story of a Cuban who’s been living in Canada for 18 years, completely immersed in Canadian culture and Canadian life.”
Puentes and his band are about to embark on their first major tour of the year, with dates in Canada and the United States. He’s looking forward to it, but has mixed feelings about touring in the States under the Trump administration.
“On one hand, I feel that I am the type of artist who brings hope to people because my music is very joyful. I’ve chosen to see life through the lens of positivity when it comes to a message to give to people. So I feel I’m completely relevant at the moment. But on the other hand, I don’t know. I wish the U.S. was going through better times.” lsaxberg@postmedia.com twitter.com/ lynnsaxberg