David Otero (Madrid, 1980) was the guitarist and one of the two composers of El Canto del Loco, possibly the most popular Spanish pop-rock group of the first decade of the millennium, and one of the last that managed to surpass one million records. albums sold before the streaming It will change the laws of the game. In 2010 they stopped singing together. Their last drummer, Jandro Velázquez, left music; The bassist, Chema Ruiz, formed several alternative groups with little impact (Belgrado, Salvador Tóxico and Trötegalôpe) and Dani Martín began a successful solo career. Otero (who is Dani’s cousin) did it more calmly, first with two albums published under the pseudonym El Pescao and, since 2017, with his first and last name. natural intelligence It is his sixth full-length and the excuse to hold this interview with ICON via video call. The musician connects from a parked car, with his seat belt on, although he takes it off halfway through the interview. It could be a metaphor, but it’s not.
In his new album he is critical of technological progress and social networks. Have the comments you read in them about you affected you? Yes, totally. In fact, I made the decision a long time ago not to read practically anything. I make my videos, I upload them, but I’m not aware of whether someone sends me a specific message, criticizing and such. Twitter, in fact, I took it off three years ago. These tools can be very valuable for telling and exposing some things, but they are very dangerous for your emotional development.
You have never had qualms about mentioning that you were going to therapy. When did you start doing it and why? I started psychoanalysis in 2006, but it has not been constant, I have been going through many moments of therapy in my life. When I was 18, I started dating my first girlfriend. She went to the psychologist and I was very interested. “What are you taking about? What do you say?” I am lucky that my wife is a psychologist, my father-in-law is a psychiatrist and we have an environment where mental health and understanding who we are as people is treated in a very natural way, and conflict with emotions too. For me it is one more piece within your health, like having a nutritionist or a person who gives you physical treatment to be healthy.
In 2006 it was precisely the moment of greatest popular emergence of El Canto del Loco. Did your decision to go to therapy have anything to do with managing that sudden and excessive success? It had more to do with an investigation about myself, about how I had grown up, who I was, I was about to be a father, I lived in Argentina… I was very far away, in fact, from the success of El Canto del Loco, because we had taken I took a break for a few months and discussed more topics related to my family, the relationships I have had with other people and how to face parenthood. I have always experienced the overwhelming popularity of the band very naturally and knowing that it was part of a fiction. I saw myself as an actor who makes a series that is successful. There’s a part there where it’s not the person who is successful, it’s the character, and that’s who people see. The public saw a part of my life that was me on stage playing songs or appearing in videos, but they had no idea who I was.
Why do you think his followers had the wrong idea? When El Canto del Loco started, the company approached it as a fan project, and it bothered us a lot. We were very young then, of course, we wanted to be real rockers, so we started to fight against that a little. Then, when many years pass, you realize that the most important thing that has been there has been having written our own songs and having the power to have said: “We did this.” In those first moments you cared about what they thought or who they thought you were, but in the end, over time, only the songs remain.
In your solo career, you did not perform songs from El Canto del Loco again until you re-recorded several of them on your album Otero and mefrom 2021. Did you need to establish distance from your previous group until you reconciled with your legacy? Completely. I had forbidden myself from singing any song from El Canto del Loco, even if I had composed it. I don’t know, it’s a super crazy process, right? The one that you live with yourself, like you impose certain barriers on yourself that are invisible and that only you see, as if those songs didn’t exist. And it was out of fear, surely, out of fear of comparison, of being heard in a voice other than Dani’s… I was 30 years old when I started alone, but I still felt immature to be able to face that. I had to go through the entire process of my grief, my reconciliation, and reconnect, heal and close the wound. Until, suddenly, I found that, at home, I was singing songs from El Canto del Loco by myself and there was one day when I asked myself: why am I not going to be able to sing it?
Did it bother you a lot that your career was pitted against that of Dani Martín? No, because they are incomparable. I am clear about what my role is, where I am, what resources I have and who he is. It is very clear to me and I am delighted with the role that I have had to play in that regard. It is not necessary to compare us to see reality and no, it has never bothered me.
But, socially, degrowth is usually seen as something negative. Your cousin uses up eight Wizinks and you’re back to small rooms. How have you assimilated this paradigm shift? Like a learning. Of course it has happened to me, that people came to me and told me: “But, man, this is a failure, because you no longer have popularity, fame or money”, but there was a time when we were no longer happy in the band. I put my mental health and my personal happiness before everything that a successful career could give you. That growth was inversely proportional to my personal growth. I was also very happy with the group, but I am infinitely happier now despite having less capacity to do things, with much less budgets, with much less marketing, with much less of everything.
Why did you stop being happy with El Canto del Loco? We were super honest when we left it, it didn’t take long for the decision to be made, it was a matter of months, and I think that’s something that I’m very proud of, myself and my colleagues, to say: “What balls we had not to stretch the gum for money, for fame, and to be faithful to what we felt!” Not many people do that.
Yes, but why weren’t they happy anymore? What was happening? Telling him that in five minutes is impossible, but by making a kind of trailer, let’s say that he had lost the personal sense of doing things for the love of art, for sharing, for truly connecting with people. There was a machinery behind it on the part of managers and the industry that made that break down a bit.
His last manager was Carlos Vázquez, “Tibu”who was denounced for misappropriation and ended up sentenced to prison. I don’t dedicate a minute of my time to this man. In fact, when they give him space in the media and he gives interviews, it’s like… What he has to do is get to work and pay what he owes.
A common practice in the industry has always been to use session players on recordings instead of the band’s musicians, especially when they are starting out. Did it happen to you too? Specifically, I did record the guitars on the first album (The song of the madmanpublished in 2000), but the drums and basses are not played by us as a band. I had been older, I played better or, what do I know, I had trained more and I did it in a decent and acceptable way, but the drums and bass didn’t let us record them ourselves and it was something that bothered us a lot. We had a pretty big fight with everyone, from the producer, with whom we didn’t really like working, to the record company. We told them that we needed more time and everything was like: “Quickly, now!” On the second disc (Against the currentfrom 2002) we already refused, we said: we want a producer who listens to us, who understands us, who understands our music and who does not bring a session musician to record our drums. That’s why El Canto del Loco really started with the second album, when we started working with Nigel Walker, and with whom we continued until the end.
The producer of that first album was Alejo Stivelfrom Tequila. (nods)
What was the best and worst of what you experienced in The Fool’s Song? The best was when the connection between us was magical and we flowed, that was brutal. What happens is that it was a very natural, very real connection, but then, when everything started to grow so much, realities were greatly distorted and each person saw things in a very different way. It is like a centrifugal force, if you are very much in the center you stay close, but when there are forces that try to take you to the sides you are thrown away. I think that was the best and the worst at the same time: the feeling that, from being so united, we went on to not want to be together.
You have always been a very well traveled person. Did that help you keep your feet more on the ground? It has been fundamental for me, one of the pillars of my life. I have been fortunate to travel especially to very humble places, with many needs, in different cooperation projects. We went to Kenya, to Peru, and I also felt quite involved with the issue of the tsunami in Thailand. I was just returning from a trip and a few hours later the tsunami devastated a beach where I had been hours before and everyone died. It was devastating. What I’m going to say may sound harsh, but if you die tomorrow, people will say: “Oh, what a shame! What was he doing?” And that’s it. If you think you are so important in people’s lives, you have a huge problem, because you are out of touch with reality. When you connect with people who are having a hard time, who are hungry, who are cold, who don’t have a home… The reality of the world is not Spain, where we are privileged, but that of millions and millions of people who live very screwed lives. That’s when you say: “Holy shit! How selfish for me to believe that I am here on the crest of the wave!” When you become aware of this, your priorities may adjust.
It must be difficult to think about that when you are in a dressing room or a hotel acclaimed by a legion of fans. A curious thing happens to me. I often meet people who tell me: “Damn, I was a huge fan of yours!” or “David wrote on my forehead”, “I was in love with you”. I always respond: “And it’s lucky that we’ve grown up! Right?”, and people laugh with me. I just don’t see that as normal, I’ve never really been a fan of anyone. We live in a fiction. In the end, all that we build is a character that helps us believe that I am a musician, that I have recorded songs, but I think the reality of life is somewhere else and many times, unfortunately, we forget about it.
Now that Oasis returns, it can already be said that taller towers have fallen. What is the sweetest offer that has been made to you to reunite El Canto del Loco? I swear on my life that they have never made me any offer for the group to return, never ever. And it’s not a question of them offering me anything, it’s not a question of money, it’s a question of how I feel about myself and my life. By the way, how bad the return of Oasis has been for me! I think I’m the only one who’s not happy.
