Susana Zabaleta is releasing her new album called La Sensatez y la Cordura 2 produced by her, as always, since she is very demanding with her work and wants everything to her liking. The album comes out at the end of November and has arrangements by maestro Alejandro Cervantes, who is an incredible Cuban musician, and maestro Marco Morel, who has been singing and playing with her for years. Simply put, he is happy with this release.
“It took about a year and a half or so for us to come to an agreement, that this song did, that this one didn’t, that I didn’t like the arrangement, that this tone is better, because what I like is to sing them first, or That is, the arrangements are made, my musicians learn them and we sing them live so that when it comes time to record you say wow! Also, you try them and see how they go with people because there are songs with which you say ‘oh no, better not’ and with others ‘oh, look how much they liked it!’. Besides, now I play songs by new people who are doing boleros like ‘Daniel, you are killing me’ with whom I do a song and ‘Escarlata’ who are two girls who composed a song for me from an interview they heard where I was talking about love, that I am stupidly sensitive and in love. And that I, as that phrase says, prefer a minute of something wonderful than an entire empty life. For me, love is basic, I am addicted to the adrenaline of love, so from an experience of love and betrayal they made me a song that is brutal. The truth is, the album has 12 wonderful songs and each one has a great story,” he explained.
Text: Adriana Nolasco Photography: Roberto Tetlalmatzin
The album can be found on different platforms, obviously digital, but it will also be released on vinyl. And curiously, like Susana, her son is also releasing his first album, although he had already released some songs, but never a complete album. “We are both very excited because we are musicians and we have both tried to reach people through harmonies and lyrics, so it is going to be very exciting. However, he does not collaborate with me because I always leave that very aside. To begin with, my children don’t even have my last name, because I always told them that it would be much easier to take it, but they told me ‘we want to do our own thing and if we are successful, what a father, but we don’t want to be the daughter or the son of Susana Zabaleta’, which I admire a lot, because they make it more difficult, but no way, that’s how they wanted it.
“My son sings, plays the guitar and is very happy. And my daughter is an actress and she has two works right now, one called An Apology to Lady Gaga, which is great, it’s about a gay relationship, although she is not, she has always been a fighter for gay rights. , like his mother, and that makes me very happy. He also acts in one called Los Fridos, which is about Frida Kahlo’s students. So I love that they are both immersed in art and very in touch with their feelings. It’s difficult because being so sensitive and so in touch with your feelings is sometimes painful, but it’s comforting in many ways,” he said proudly.
The beginnings and their reasons According to Susana, being born with her sensitivity in Monclova, Coahuila, was quite a challenge because she was always ‘the strange one’, ‘the curious daughter’, the ‘oh, Susana!’ She always told her friends or colleagues that her mother did not give her permission to hang out with them or go out, but her friends’ mothers asked her mother why she did not give her permission. And her mother didn’t understand why she said that and it was because she didn’t want to see them. It was boring and she just wanted to think.
“Definitely, that was not my place and when I arrived in Monterrey to study high school, one of my boyfriends, who was German, invited me to see the opera Samson and Delilah and when I saw it I said: ‘I want to do that, I don’t know.’ What a mess it is, but I want to do that.’ So I asked my boyfriend to help me and the German, who was super active, told me he was going to search and that’s how he found the Higher School of Music and Dance, Carmen Romano de López Portillo. Soon I started studying opera without my parents knowing, because if not, they would kill me, so I studied high school and opera at the same time. And the truth was that’s when I said: ‘oh, I’m not the only weird one.’ For the first time someone told me that ‘the father is strange’. That’s what’s great. Why do you want to be equal to everyone else? Because I had always suffered from not being equal to others. Now that everyone knows about mental illnesses, I know what I have, this thing of not being able to feel people so much, that when there are crowds I start to panic, but imagine a 15-year-old girl saying ‘I’m the strange, I’m the geek,’ until I found music,” she revealed.
It was while he was studying in Monterrey, living with his brother, when he realized that he was not there in the afternoons and confessed that he was studying music, he asked him not to tell his parents, which did not happen and his father was direct to talk to his teacher and when he confronted her he asked her, from one to 10, what grade she gave him; He answered that it was an eight, but that it could reach 10.
“My dad calmed down and told me that he didn’t agree, but that it was my fault and he wasn’t going to give me even a fifth for the race or go to my shows. He even said to take away his last name. My dad was very hard…he just died. And I never asked him for money, but he did come to see me. The first time was in a play I did with Manolo Fábregas, which was The Violinist on the Roof, and when I was doing a scene where the father and daughter say goodbye, never to see each other again, my father, who was sitting in the third row, started. to cry and I had never seen him cry in my life. Plus, I was singing when Manolo was singing. It was a chill, but a nice memory. Painful, but very beautiful,” he noted.
Music, a universal language
What Susana likes most is singing, because that is her origin. And he loves singing in various settings such as in a musical comedy, with a huge orchestra, with a smaller band, etc. “I believe that music is the only thing we all agree on. Music is the only thing that all people in the world do exactly the same. I sang in Japan with maestro Manzanero and I remember that it was very impressive because the first day we sang in a stadium full of people and when we started singing This afternoon I saw it rain, people shouted ‘I saw people running and you weren’t there’, and I said ‘this can’t be in Japan’. There they loved Maestro Manzanero, when we arrived there was a line of people who, as they passed, said to him: ‘Manzanero-san, Manzanero-san.’ And I said ‘it can’t be, this doesn’t even happen in Mexico’. In Mexico, they did not honor the teacher as he deserved. That man should have been in Fine Arts singing his songs with orchestras like Juan Gabriel did. “We should have honored him in a very different way,” he said.
Regarding the strength that the bolero is taking on other musical genres, she explained that logically one has to return to love and seduce through music because this is cyclical “that is, you already screwed up, you heard caca, you already got involved.” everything and again love returns, the sound is restored and your ears return to hearing beautiful things, you hear nature again and you understand that there is an empathy of a man and a woman hearing beautiful things that have to do with boleros because love is transmitted in songs and always has been. The songs are telegrams of love. We all have a song that we always remember when we propose to someone, when we are serenaded without mariachis, the one we used at the wedding or when our child was born. The songs are testimonies of the times we are living in and now it fascinates me to hear so many kids in their twenties doing boleros, that’s cool, dad,” he said.
On the other hand, regarding how she would like to be remembered, she mentioned that she has a first cousin who was very important in her life because when she arrived in Mexico City she lived with her and her family. She fell ill with multiple sclerosis.
“One of the last things my cousin told me left a mark on my soul: ‘I love your life because you have always done whatever you want’ and she said it to me with a hint of nostalgia. It was very sad because people get sick when they don’t do what they want and the body has to shout it in one way or another, that’s why we get sick, because we don’t say the things we want. And because of this Judeo-Christian thing that they taught us and being women and what it should be. I told him ‘if you saw what it has cost me to do what I want’. It sounds very easy, but the terror of arriving at night to say ‘I’m alone with two children’ has been very difficult because childhood is destiny and what stays in your head is what they taught you. So feeling guilty for having done whatever you want is not easy, it is very difficult,” he pointed out.
