Rodrigo Leão: “I don’t know if my career would have existed without the Madredeus years.”

Rodrigo Leão (Lisbon, 60) has the feat of having made history in the international expansion of Portuguese music without resorting to fado. He also has the feat of selling albums where he sang in Latin. The first happened with Madredeus, that group that toured the world several times. The second, during his solo adventure beginning in the 1990s. On April 25th, the 51st anniversary of the Carnation Revolution , he published O rapaz da montanha (The Mountain Boy), and the day before, in this interview, he was unable to specify whether it was number 21 or 22 in his discography. Which, in itself, is revealing both of his creative capacity and of the little importance he places on the numbers that summarize a successful career. This Tuesday he performs at the Teatros del Canal in Madrid, to a sold-out audience, and later in Tenerife (November 29) and Bilbao to present O rapaz da montanha , the most Portuguese work by perhaps the least Portuguese of the country's composers. An album that pays tribute to Zeca Afonso and the singer-songwriters who took up guitars against the dictatorship.

Question : Where do you find new inspiration when you've already done so much?

Answer: It's always difficult because inspiration can't be forced. You have to have patience and persistence. Maybe 20 years ago I felt more blocked or pressured to make different albums, but I've always done what I wanted. My music has influences ranging from tango to classical, British pop, and Brazilian music, and the public has grown accustomed to finding different things. This album is the most Portuguese, more so than The Portuguese , the instrumental music I made for a documentary series about the last eighty years of the country by António Barreto and Joana Pontes. In a way, it's a continuation of that project. It's an album very influenced by what I listened to in the seventies, like Zeca Afonso. I never thought I'd make an album like this, although it clearly doesn't have the strong political message that existed back then. There's a great complicity between the people closest to me who participate in the backing vocals. My partner, Ana Carolina Costa, writes almost all the lyrics.

Q. Is Rodrigo Leão the predator of the mountains ?

A. No. The album is called that because we all have a little bit of ourselves in us, who aren't content with the day-to-day life we ​​live, and sometimes we have moments when we feel like escaping to a mountaintop to think. It defines the spirit of the album well, with the chorus and the percussion. Titles are always very complicated.

P. You said in an interview that music is a therapy.

A: I'm very restless; I can't stay in one place for 20 minutes, but the music I make transmits a sense of peace; it ultimately combats my hectic life. Perhaps I have some peace within me that comes out intuitively through music. It can almost be therapeutic.

Q. Is composing what gives you the most pleasure in the process?

A. I'm a self-taught musician. I like coming up with ideas; it's the part that gives me the most pleasure, but in the last twenty years, I've started to enjoy concerts, where there's direct contact with the audience. I have musicians I've worked with for many years, and we have a great connection. The most tedious part is when we go to the studio; it's many days of repetition, and I have no patience. I'm present, but I have two people I trust who are more demanding than I am to oversee the process.

Q. Was being self-taught a handicap or an advantage?

A. It was a positive thing. Since I didn't study music, things come to me more intuitively and spontaneously. It's clear that there's also a negative side to it, which is that it takes me a long time to make arrangements, although I have people who help me. I have a somewhat lazy side; I could have studied music, but I started composing in the early 1980s when there were bands like Joy Division, New Order , and Echo & the Bunnymen, who played very badly but were good. In the early 1970s, people understood that with three chords they could make inspired songs. Before this album, I recorded Piano para piano , where I, who never studied piano, played with my daughter, who studied piano for ten years. We did 15 concerts. It was beautiful because it was a dialogue in which we learned a lot from each other, having very different musical universes.

Q. Do you feel you have more creative freedom now than you did at Madredeus?

A. In the last three years of Madredeus , we played a lot of concerts, and I preferred to be at home composing. Back then, I enjoyed playing live much less than I do now.

Q. And why?

A. I liked concerts. I have fantastic memories of touring Japan and Brazil, but as a self-taught musician, playing those 160 concerts a year, my technique didn't develop much. I was with Madredeus for eight years and Sétima Legião for ten. When I decided to start composing my own music, the ideas didn't fit with either of them. In the 1990s, I was deeply fascinated by the minimalist movement of composers like Michael Nyman, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and Philip Glass. I composed on a computer, recording symphonic music with Latin voices. That's why the first album, released in 1993, was very different. I didn't want to do what I'd already done with them, and that's why the first albums were more minimalist and experimental, and I didn't play many concerts. Only after Alma Mater (2000) did I start using a different lineup with drums and bass. We started to have songs in English, French, and Spanish. People started getting used to these mixes. But this album is different. When I started composing I knew it would all be sung in Portuguese.

Q. What is your relationship with the memory of Madredeus?

A. It's been almost 40 years, but it doesn't feel like 40 years. Madredeus is still very much a part of me and what I do, both Madredeus and Sétima Legião. We were very good friends; we continue to work together on many projects. I often go to lunch with Pedro Ayres Magalhães , with whom I started Madredeus in 1985. I have fond memories. My career would have been very different—I don't even know if it would have existed—if I hadn't spent those years with Madredeus, where I learned a lot from my colleagues.

Q. Could you get back together on stage?

R. It's difficult, but you never know.

Q. Would you like to?

A. I would like to, I would like to. Unfortunately, Francisco [Ribeiro] hasn't been with us for many years, but I would like to. I'm really looking forward to playing with him.