An Introspective Rebel Tries to Invade Pop Territory

It’s a warm autumn afternoon in Glendale, and Colombian singer Juanes is crying. The 28-year-old songwriter touches his cup of cafe con leche, wipes his tears with his sleeve and manages a smile.

This kind of emotional display isn’t exactly a surprise. “Fijate Bien,” Juanes’ debut album of confessional pop songs, has earned him a reputation for being honest and vulnerable.

Juanes, whose real name is Juan Esteban Aristizabal, is not crying because of a longing for his homeland, although the Colombian restaurant where he’s having coffee could certainly warrant a wave of nostalgia for the homeland he left for Miami about a year ago.

He’s not crying over “Fijate Bien’s” commercial success, either. The collection, which Universal Latino released in the U.S. in October, has been the No. 1 album in Colombia for 10 consecutive weeks.

No, Juanes is crying because he is feeling overwhelmed by the power of his own convictions. Should “Fijate Bien” not sell well enough in the U.S. to guarantee him a career in pop, Juanes says in his lilting Spanish, he will not give up. He will continue fighting until the very end. He will write and record songs even if he has to do it at his own expense. Even if the only listeners left standing are his family and friends. Hasta la muerte. Till the day of his death.

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For the last three years, Latin American music--with the glaring exception of the pop genre--has been experiencing a creative and commercial renaissance. In this effervescent world, “Fijate Bien” is much more than just the debut effort of a restless songwriter.

The album also marks the first incursion into pop territory by the main architect of the rock en espanol movement, Gustavo Santaolalla, producer of seminal albums by alternative artists such as Cafe Tacuba, Molotov and Julieta Venegas.

The Juanes project is something of a gamble, both for Santaolalla and Universal Latino, which distributes the producer’s label, Surco.

For one thing, Juanes doesn’t have the archetypal sex appeal of most male stars in the genre. And his introspective, challenging songs, with their constant references to the turbulent state of affairs in Colombia, are not the kind of bubbly, attention-grabbing records you expect from the big names in Latin pop.

It’s easy to think of Juanes as a potent antidote to the malaise that has defined Latin pop for the last decade. Dominated by performers such as Ricky Martin, Luis Miguel and Enrique Iglesias, the field has steadily become the laughingstock of the musically sophisticated Latin music community. Compared with the eclecticism of rock en espanol or the soulfulness of tropical music, most Spanish pop sounds prefabricated, frivolous and downright silly.

Santaolalla and Juanes aren’t the only team proposing an alternative to the sound of mainstream pop. Andres Levin, the producer second only to Santaolalla in terms of his influence in Latin rock, did much the same thing earlier this year with “Pasajes de un Sueno,” an album by Ana Torroja, former singer with Spanish pop-rock group Mecano.

But the package of classy pop was a commercial disaster. Things look much better for “Fijate Bien.” If the Colombian market is any indication, Juanes and Santaolalla might be vindicated in their efforts to create a new kind of pop.

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As its title--which means “pay close attention”-- implies, “Fijate Bien” is a record that takes time to work its magic. The opening track, “Ahi Le Va,” is a gentle, mid-tempo pop-rocker with a bouncy beat and a laid-back, call-and-response chorus. Its insightful lyrics address those who are lost in life in one way or another: the indifferent, the bored, the angst-ridden and those who fail to understand themselves.

It’s not until the third song, the dramatic “Volcan,” that the record reflects its producer’s pedigree. Marked by a deliciously funky rhythm and sweeping orchestral passages, the tune shatters any preconceptions you might have of Latin pop as a restrained, unimaginative genre.

Some critics have compared Juanes to fellow Colombian Carlos Vives, perhaps because both songwriters find inspiration in the hot, accordion-heavy style of traditional music known as vallenato. But Vives is a traditional musician toying with modern pop idioms, while Juanes is a bona fide popster flirting with tradition. It is precisely his keen understanding of mainstream pop that could turn him into a Latin music star.

So complete is Juanes’ identification with the lexicon of English rock and pop that he started his career as the lead singer with a heavy metal group named Ekhymosis. The band released five discs before Juanes’ creative instincts took him in another direction.

“I started to feel this big absence while I was playing metal,” he explains. “I would look at the photos of the guys from my favorite bands and realize that they were all from Los Angeles or San Francisco. And the fact of the matter is that I was from Medellin. Suddenly, I had the desire to make music that was closer to my roots.”

In 1999, Juanes threw caution to the wind and moved to Los Angeles, where he managed to get some of his demos in the hands of Santaolalla.

At the Colombian restaurant, Juanes has finished crying, but he admits it’s something he does often. He broke down in tears of gratitude, for instance, when Santaolalla called to say that he wanted to sign him to his label.

“He listened to the demos I had recorded in Medellin and decided to sign me on,” says Juanes. “Gustavo [Santaolalla] taught me a lot. He was like a musical guide, helping me bring the very best out of me.”

The singer plans to spend the next year touring with a full band, a dream he has harbored for years.

“You can’t imagine what I lived through until this record finally became a reality,” he emphasizes. “That’s another story. What matters now is that I’m finally doing what I always wanted to do.”

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WRONG MOVES: Compiling Tito Puente’s RCA recordings was an excellent idea, considering that the late percussionist was at his creative peak during his years with the label--1949 to 1951 and between 1955 and ’60. Unfortunately, some disastrous choices turn Puente’s “The Complete RCA Recordings, Volume 1” into an embarrassment.

BMG Latin has forsaken the industry’s established standard of lavish retrospectives in favor of a cheaply made cardboard set housing the six discs and a flimsy booklet with a short essay and no information on the specific sessions and musicians involved.

Worse, the compilers have disrupted the original order of the songs in such legendary albums as “Dancemania” and “Cuban Carnival,” failing to even mention which record each track is from.

This is unforgivable considering that most of Puente’s albums from the ‘50s are conceptual affairs, carefully calculated musical programs that created an indelible mood. Particularly appalling is the decision to rearrange the songs from 1960’s superb “Tambo,” leaving “Call of the Jungle Birds,” one of that record’s most hypnotic tracks, off this first set (a second one will follow early next year). Look instead for the individual remastered versions of the original albums that BMG released in the early ‘90s.