The Bad Arts 021: Juan Wauters
The Uruguayan-born, New York-based musician returned to Montevideo to share the many traditions and tales from his hometown on his latest LP, MVD LUV.
Juan Wauters is speaking to me while on a bus travelling through Queens, New York—where he’s based—as he makes his way to see a friend and go to the post office. It felt right to be talking to him while he’s on the move given that the portrait we get of him from his music is of someone constantly on the go, inching closer to the next location, next album.
MVD LUV, Wauter’s seventh solo LP, hears him going back to where it all started; to his birthplace of Montevideo, Uruguay. The album opens with an introduction from the artist, “It’s 2024 and a lot has happened since my first release. This time around you catch me in Montevideo,” Wauters says, “This is the first time I get to record an album here. I have always longed to do this.” The brief welcome not only introduces us to where Wauters is physically within this album, but effectively transports listeners to the streets where he grew up. Through his usual economic and everyday turns of phrase, MVD LUV is a bright and breezy work buoyed not only by the infectious percussion throughout, but by a feeling of ease conjured from the comfort of home.
During our chat, Wauters shared his experiences making MVD LUV, an album of sentimentality, celebration and discovery, recent reflections on his catalogue and making an album in…Ireland?
TBA: Before we talk about your new album MVD LUV, I have to let you know that there’s an old gig poster of yours, from maybe 10 years ago, in the women’s bathroom of Whelan’s in Dublin and so whenever I’m drying my hands, I think of you and your music. Do you have plans to play in Ireland on your next tour?
Juan Wauters: I hope so, every time I go to Dublin it’s great. The last time I played [a show] in there was in 2022, I think. It was my first European show after Covid. The venue reminded me of a circus, and it was upstairs.
TBA: That sounds like it was in The Grand Social. Was it shortly after that tour that you went to Montevideo to start working on MVD LUV?
Juan Wauters: Yeah, it was right around that time when I was starting to be in Uruguay more. Now, I'm there more often.
TBA: How was it making an album in Uruguay? MVD LUV is such a fun listen; there were times when it felt like I’d been transported to the streets of Montevideo, especially when the exuberant percussion kicked in. Why did this feel like the right time to make this album and explore this side of your identity?
Juan Wauters: Well, I don't know how you're living life, but it feels like time passes and things keep presenting themself in front of you. Ideas and things keep popping up and, somehow, it seems like the right moment. Previously, I hadn’t had the chance to be there and spend time in Uruguay long-term to study the music up close and make relationships with people that I could work with. After Covid, which was really stressful here in New York, and in years before that, I had spent some time in Uruguay playing shows, and I made some new friends. It just felt like a good idea to go there and escape the way Covid was being lived in New York, because, as I said, it was very stressful. That's how it all started, actually, by going there to escape Covid and I was slowly finding comfort in being in Uruguay.
TBA: How did you find the musicians that played on the album? They're all local musicians, right?
Juan Wauters: Yeah! In comparison to New York, Montevideo is a small scene so it feels like everyone knows each other there. The musicians know each other, so it was a little nerve-wracking for me to be the new guy in the scene. But at the same time, everyone was very nice, I took it all in really well, getting used to new groups of people. Even though I was born there, I never really considered my music as being from there. Then, all of a sudden, I'm there and they're like, ‘Oh, yeah, I've heard of you, you’re a Uruguayan that does music abroad!’ I slowly started meeting more people, and through these meetings, we would get together and play music together. I made some really good relationships during that tim and a lot of those people are featured on the album.
TBA: I find that when you go somewhere different, even if you're familiar with the place, to meet new people and become part of a new community, your perspective on how you make music or the things you want to explore in the work can change. It can be so reinvigorating. Did you find that happened to you with this album; it felt like a breath of fresh air?
Juan Wauters: Thank you for bringing that perspective. Yeah, definitely and since you've brought that perspective, it seems like a pattern of something I do to find new ways of making albums; to keep that fresh air and that freshness and purity alive. I don't want to become stagnant or comfortable in the way I make music.
TBA: You sing predominantly in Spanish across MVD LUV. I enjoyed reading the translations of the lyrics and following along as you reiterated the importance of singing and expressing yourself in the songs. Did writing and singing in a mixture of Spanish and English help unlock new sentiments and ideas in your songwriting?
Juan Wauters: Not that I could tell, but it’s always been my goal to improve my songwriting as I go through the years. I think I am deeper now than before, and I can find better ways to express myself. Well, I don't know if they're better, but different! As for Spanish and English being used in the album, that's just my bilingual life being shown. There isn't one of the two that I feel more comfortable expressing myself in. Sometimes the feeling shows up in one language, and sometimes it appears in the other. With this album, being in a Spanish-speaking place, more of the content was in Spanish just because of the location. My day-to-day life was happening in Spanish.
TBA: On the song ‘Mutuación’, you sing, “Every time I wrote a song, I was thinking / I was wondering if what I was singing, they were things that everyone could understand.” That line can be interpreted as you being concerned that your personal experiences may not be shared and you’re singing in a language not everyone understands. Were you worried people wouldn’t connect with this album as much as they had with your previous releases?
Juan Wauters: I hadn't thought of it from a language point of view. When I sing in one language, I cut the other ones out, in some way. That line came to me because I really make an effort to say things clearly. I want to use language that’s accessible and I want the message to come across, but I also appreciate poetry and a freaky way of living; a freaky way of saying things, a freaky way of expressing yourself. I don't want to make things that are plain. There has to be something that makes it special.
Sometimes, in trying to make things special and aesthetically pleasing to me, or what I hope the world would like, I wonder if my message doesn’t come across clearly. That was me just wondering if what I'm singing are things that people can understand. I know that most of the time people can understand my lyrics and that the plain conversational, straightforwardness of my lyrics comes across perfectly, but sometimes I don't think they do. I was mostly commenting on that.
TBA: As I said, the album made me feel like I was in Uruguay from the way you captured the essence of the energy on the streets in ‘La Lucia’ and ‘Aeropuerto’ with the cacophony of percussion incorporated into the arrangements. Were you making trips into town to make recordings of things that you wanted to add to the arrangements to present a multifaceted and authentic representation of your time in Montevideo?
Juan Wauters: Yes, definitely. That's how I live life! Thank you for these thoughtful questions. Later in the process, it was a challenge to translate those sonic worlds from the streets onto an album and preserve some type of sound quality, because something that we tried to do with this album was to make it sound like industry standards. We wanted to explore the world because I have explored many different ways of approaching the recording process and different formats from more underground and more experimental types of recording.
This time around, we wanted to make it sound clear and clean. I wondered how I could capture such an everyday-type of moment onto the album while preserving the sound quality and making it sound real. Specifically for ‘La Lucia,’ you’ll notice, at some point, the instruments fade and we're left alone with the drums. This traditional drum pattern is called Candombe and it’s from the city. It's originally just drums playing different patterns and interlocking. Later on, Uruguayans added musical instruments and melodies to these drums, but the original music was just percussive. I wanted to show that to the world, not just the drums in the background, but also, I wanted them to have a moment to themselves.
We did the same with ‘Aeropuerto,’ towards the end where the drums come back for a little bit, and it’s just the drums. Aside from having music, songs and messages, I wanted to make sure that it was a document. I wanted to document and showcase Uruguayan music styles for people who have never experienced it before.
TBA: I read an interview you gave a while ago where you said that you bring a radio with you everywhere you travel to listen to local radio stations. What are Uruguayan radio stations like? What’s popular and did the music you were hearing on the radio impact some of the choices you made with some of the arrangements?
Juan Wauters: Definitely, yes! It's very varied because, like everywhere, there are so many radio stations so you choose what to listen to. What surprised me about coming back to Uruguay and spending time there was that some Uruguayan musicians, who I didn't think much of in the past, this time around, however, a song of theirs would come on and I would be like, ‘Oh wow, this guy is pretty good!’ I’d never thought that before. I suppose because they’re played more often on the radio there, I had contact with them and their catalogue more often and I got deep into the catalogue in a way that I would never have explored otherwise. Being exposed to these other singers and music on a day-to-day basis, or in a more fluent way, definitely influenced the sounds we chose to have on the album and the way we approached the making of the album.
There’s one Uruguayan song I heard while being there that does the trick, where the music fades and then just the drums continue. Someone had already done that trick and I did it again. I'm sure he was also inspired by someone else.
TBA: Who was that?
Juan Wauters: Hugo Fattorusso, he’s a very well-known Uruguayan keyboard player and composer. The song is called ‘Walking’, and he had a band, at the beginning of his career. He had a band when the Beatles came out. Of course, at that time, Beatles-like bands came up everywhere, and that culture manifested in different ways worldwide. He and his brother had a band called Los Shakers and they were good. They sang in a weird, basic English, but the arrangements and songwriting were good. I haven't heard another Beatles-mockery band as good as that one.
TBA: In ‘Aeropuerto’, you sing, “Never stop making music, never stop giving your heart.” How, if at all, do you feel that this album and the experience of making it has impacted the way you’ll approach making future projects or how you play shows?
Juan Wauters: Specifically for the live show, in late May, I got together with some guys in Uruguay to play some of the songs. I hadn't played them as a group yet because the album was recorded with little ensembles. We hadn't thought of a way to present it live. It felt great to experience that, to play these songs with Uruguayans, because they know all the subtleties of the genres.
As for the future, this album specifically, and making an album in general, as you just said, sets you on your way to make your next album. You can cross something off your list, I can now say, 'Ok, I did my Uruguayan album!’ Recently, I revisited my whole discography. I had a DJ gig on Lot Radio, and they gave me two hours to DJ.
I brought the majority of the albums I have released on vinyl from the beginning until now. That’s 10 albums plus some singles. We started with The Beats, the band I had at the beginning, and then we did all my solo albums. I looked at all the albums with the perspective of the different things I explored across my albums, and I realised how, since I started being a solo artist, I’ve been more self-sufficient. I deal with a lot of things myself, and I do a lot of things myself. In some ways, it took me away from a communal sound and spirituality that music has when it's played together with people in the moment.
I heard that on my early Beats album, we had three albums, and those albums were recorded live at the studio. The band was playing there and singing at the same time. Everything that you hear happens in real time. Now, it's not like that. Now we overlay elements, we put things on top of each other. Also, times have changed, and technologies have come. That's just the way people record these days, with the computer, editing and everything. It made me think that for future projects, hopefully soon, I'd like to do some live performances for an album. Play and sing and have that be the album, like an old-school type of thing.
TBA: You should make an album in Ireland!
Juan Wauters: I'd love to. I've done location albums where I've done some through Latin America, and now a specific location in Uruguay. I feel like Ireland could be a good place to do that. You know how people there get together with their instruments and just play traditional songs? I love that. The poetry and writing in Ireland are among the best in the world. I could imagine being inspired by the writers and people there.