The story begins when David Bowie cut his hair. For Montoia. For you?

My story begins before I was born. They were gypsies on the part of their grandfather. In the Aralar area they worked with the sheep, they talked about the romintxel... Grandpa seems to be the first fruit between a Gypsy father and a mother afflicted. He's just an artist playing guitar. Like my father. My father had a kind of Los Panchos team. With him, I learned the first chords. In the 1960s, the parents had to be temporarily exiled to Paris, and upon their return, the songs of Jacques Brel, Edith Piaf and Aznavour helped their father’s boleros. My brother and I started listening to rock and we played a coup d'état. Lou Reed opened our ears and blinded us.

Even feel in you the echoes of the Madrid movement.

1980.ean In Donostia, there were four or five groups that played in so many other rooms. We sang in Spanish, although we made a colorful punk we were very “pop”, very frivolous. The foamy wave of the Basque Radical Rock plunged us. All the structures of the Basque culture were immediately organised to support and promote this wave. We ran out of siege, we got devastated, we got confined to humid, gray test rooms. Many musicians from San Sebastian and Bilbao went to live in Madrid. Maybe I had to do it too, but I was a coward.

I wasn't as familiar as most of the musicians in San Sebastian, I didn't have the means, I didn't know how to get the beans out of the pot in Madrid prevented me from adventure. In addition, I had the hope that at least bread crumbs would arrive in San Sebastian. I blow! We were abandoned for ten years at the premises.

Since then has the label “cursed artist” come to you?

It's possible. Given the years I've been playing, I have few published records. Mine is an unstable and irregular journey. Those of the trade, musicians and critics know me more than the general public. In a world where everything is labeled, those who are estimated by a minority and who sell little are considered cursed artists. It's something that has a lot of fun for me. I like that underground tone. What's more, food. I do not know whether we have not just fulfilled the role that we have been forced into, or whether we do not put ourselves in the role that others want us for ourselves. It gives me prestige to be a cursed artist. I sit on the banks, opening roads. I have no choice. I'd probably be much better off in mainstream, but I can't. That I have more freedom? It would be foolish to walk in the mud and not do what you want! However, I do not believe in the lack of freedom of a mainstream group. Wherever you are, you always have links and always the loopholes to do whatever you want.

Who are the loopholes in success?

If you're not successful, it's your fault, not your public fault. I'm not one of those who think the audience is an ignorant, a sheep, a little concert enthusiast. I feel like I'm a resident shame when I hear friendly musicians protesting for the lack of concerts and the lack of public. The public is much clearer than is said. I don't think success comes from company-designed mathematical operations. Success always has a foundation. Another thing is if you like that base, if it is criticizable or not, if it adapts to your values... Success is always a consequence of something. It's time to disassemble topics about success. Make good songs, write to us, compose with desire, and tomorrow or later they will go ahead.

However, for those who wish to live from it, it is always too late.

Living from music has both buckthorn and rose. You worry about what you shouldn't worry about: how many people will come to the concert, how much money you get from the album, if you can do merchandising... A musician should not lose strength, head and time in it. You shouldn't treat the record buyer as a customer. I don't want to become a salesman. I don't want to sell anything. I don't want to continue to feed social media to make sure that I won't be forgotten. What's more, I'm on Facebook, but I think social media is a trap. The really interesting people are not on social media. So I'm trying to take the record out and disconnect it from social media. Believe me that if I give him a press conference the same day, I play a concert, I sign twenty records and I receive ten “datás”, I lie with my head to my nose. I can't say more than I say in my letters, don't ask me for speeches when publishing a record. I've had a lot of trades, now I live in music, but I'd rather be completely free and take off the records when I'm put on the tip of my nose, without an obligation to take care of the "client."

What is a good song?

A memorable song. For years, from generation to generation, what's kept in memory. Great verses that break a chorus. What I have not yet done. What I'm constantly looking for. The dream of that good song is the one I have to write the lyrics all year round. Now I meet a verse of one song, with the repetition of the other... I never write a letter, I'm accumulating in the cage, and when I have a dozen well-ordered letters, I walk into the venue and I roll on the guitar strings. Suspecting that the letter and the progression of chord coincide, recognizing the spark of a special environment, I try to untie the shell, make its nest in the melody to every word ... The two together, the word and the music. Why do I leave the words? Because I'm a singer-songwriter, not a pop singer. What starts to emerge from music gives the melody strength, which starts with words to letter. I believe that it is not possible to give birth to an impressive letter about the melody that has been created. I've written countless custom words based on the promised melodies. So I know that without clichés, patterns and boundaries, I can only write a good letter saying what I mean at the time.

In your words existentialism and humor, humor and existentialism.

You make yourself pedant unless you say a terrible humor. I like fine humor and cross-sectional grasshoppers. The face-to-face treatment of subjects is not artistic, it is clumsy. I like that what starts and ends up being coherent, everything is understandable. Most of the Impressionist letters do not convince me. Diego Vasallo is the only one in the world, a great image maker. But to the loose images and phrases of many others I find no credibility. That's not my way of writing. If you’ve had the “misfortune” to read Schopenhauer, Cioran or Pessoa, don’t expect positive thoughts. That's the poison of literature. I don't have those brilliant ideas that are mine in particular. I try to show you what anybody can think. I'm a songwriter of songs that everybody has in their head. We identify when we hear or read what we have thought and have not been able to say. That's what we like.

Do you like the temptation to mix the character and the author of your letters?

That temptation keeps food. I'm interested in people thinking that the character is an author and that the author is a character. They're actually very different. I'm not desperate from my letters, I don't live in the opposite of love, but I have to believe the opposite of my audience. Although I'm not, that makes me more interesting. Distances, I am, however, very autobiographical. I kept singing about myself. From careful reading of my words you can infer who I am. But I'm being assaulted by a whole bunch of concerns about leaving a mark. I'm happy that I serve my nephews to hear me.

Your nephews will think you're an artist moving their audience around.

The artist has to be independent, to suck his audience, to provoke him. Lou Reed achieved maximum success with his album Sally can’t dance, but he didn’t look like other world songs, and, haunted by success, published the unaudited Machine Music with a two-hour sound. Pure provocation. So far, I had an audience who believed that I was a French singer-songwriter singing with the orchestra, and out of outrage, I've released a rock album. In this way, those who liked the previous albums did not like the new album and those who were surprised by the new album cannot listen to the previous ones. I have a lot of fun with post-provocation reactions. I say in a half-voice that I intend to lose all the followers I had so far. After making an orchestra and two albums of everything, I've pulled out a rock album, and now I'm about to make a zarzuela with Joserra Senperena. You make the most interesting bets when you lose the fear of losing things.

One of your bets is taking the years?

I've been going through time very badly. It's Afrussians. People talk about the 30's and 40's crisis, but there's no crisis. When you turn 50, though, you feel that your body is wrong, you realize that memories are falling further and further behind, you start more and more sentences with “30 years ago...” I am 52 years old and I think I almost have no time left for anything. I have the feeling that everything is coming to an end, that everything is going to end soon. Aging only has one value: finding out that your defects and deficiencies make you special. I've spent all the young angry at my mistakes, obsessed with my impotence of singing and writing. I realized very late that thanks to them I was not a special artist. Now I don't care if I'm told I sing badly. I know it's my way of singing.

It's no small thing.

We live between two poles in the opposite mutuals. In one pole there is everything that changes and in the other, what does not change, has become a decay. It is not easy to find oneself between what is constantly being broken and what is constantly evolving. When you're young you don't have to think about the train you're on, but once from a certain age... I feel like a jirlachon halfway. I see a frenzied evolution on one sidewalk and traces of an earlier existence left behind on the other. He's courteous. Because that's aging, assuming that the world is constantly changing by dissolving itself. That is why we will all be forgotten very soon.