colleen

My dad passed away yesterday morning. He died from the last stage of Alzheimer’s disease, a truly horrible death, even with palliative care, and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw.
I shortly debated internally on whether or not I should keep this private, but having to “celebrate” the release of my new album less than 48 hours after his last breath is just so surreal, and I think it would feel totally inauthentic to pretend this didn’t happen.
When I titled my album Libres antes del final (“free before the ending”), I was obviously thinking about death, the ultimate ending, and it is incredibly symbolic to me that my dad’s health, after so many years of living with the disease, should have deteriorated so brutally as to precipitate his ending now (if you are not familiar with Alzheimer’s: it does kill, despite a general public perception that somehow the disease is mostly about losing your memory of who your loved ones are – it is unfortunately so much more than that).
If anything, this event makes me want to live an even fuller life than before. I am going to do my best to promote this album properly (I will be at Café Comets in Paris tomorrow as planned, 6h30 pm, for the listening session and + Q and A + signing) and I am really looking forward to playing live. Thankfully I had already rehearsed properly for live shows, so now in the runup to the shows I am going to do my best to deal with the administrative tasks that have arisen out of my dad’s passing, while also trying to rest properly to retain the mental clarity I need to play this new material and travel and be ok physically.
Sadly the videos of me swimming in the sea and of the reamping in Casa Montjuic have been cancelled due to irreconcilable differences, and the album cover nearly got cancelled too, so somehow this album seems to have a difficult birth, but I am hopeful that from now it can start a more peaceful life.
I also realized during the Bandcamp Listening Party last Friday that a wrong version of “Antídoto”, the first single, had been up on Bandcamp for all those months (I made 2 versions of that song), so if you gave it listen on the platform, please listen again now that the correct version has been uploaded, and course, tomorrow the full album will finally be available everywhere.
As always, thank you so much.

Comments are closed.