In this conversation at his home by the sea, the musician and musical director of Operación Triunfo speaks frankly about his health scare, sexual freedom, online hate, singing in Catalan, and the future of artificial intelligence in music.
— Let's start with the last chapter: are you well? How are you feeling? What happened?
— Well, I'm fine. I had a health scare for the first time in my forty-six years: a severe bilateral pneumonia that manifested with very strange, difficult-to-detect symptoms, and which cost me a week in the ICU. But that's it. Fortunately, I had a practically miraculous recovery and now I feel perfect.
— And what has all this cost you? Have you had to cancel many commitments?
— Fortunately, no. I missed one concert at a festival that couldn't be rescheduled, but we were able to relocate four others. In the end, it only cost me one flight.
— And now you can go back to playing gigs normally: Sant Joan de les Abadesses, Ceba, Sallent, la Cerdanya, l'Escala…
Yes, a full. Until October we have almost forty concerts, and I am very happy. I have two tour formats: one with the full band, with which we present the new album, and another where I go solo on the piano, which is what I do most often. In fact, in band format there will be thirteen or fourteen; the rest (twenty-six) I do alone, up and down, throughout the territory.
— Let's talk about Galàxies, your latest work. Are you doing anything different from what you've done so far? Is there a personal leap?
— I think so. It's a cliché to say it's the most mature, which is logical with the passage of time, but above all, it's the first album I've composed with the intention of talking exclusively about one topic: it's monographic, and it talks about love. I wanted to make an album of songs that talk about love in all its aspects: physical love, family love, sexual love, the freedom to love. I think I've come up with very honest songs, in which I've dared to say things I might never have said before.
I wanted to make an album of songs that talk about love in all its aspects.
— One perceives a deeper and more reflective side in you, but also a very playful one (we've seen it in some music videos). To what extent is there depth behind an apparent superficiality?
— That's a good question. I think playing can bring you closer to loving more. Precisely the most playful and provocative song on the album, Astres, is musically very joyful, festive, a carefree funky, but it talks about something important: the need to practice sex freely and to decouple sex from love. I suppose that, since I'm in this mid-life crisis where you question whether you've achieved what you want or if you're with whom you want to be, I've realized that there's still a lot of taboo in this society around that.
— Why do you think it's still so hard?
— Because by being a sexually liberated person, you are often labeled as degenerate, a bad person, perverted, frivolous, incapable of commitment. And I would like to be able to separate these things: we all have sexual desire, to a greater or lesser extent, and each person experiences it in their own way. There are those who need to exploit it and put it into practice, and that's perfectly fine; and there are those who don't, and that's also perfectly fine. It's a bit about fighting against the stigma that those who are sexually liberated are degenerates. For me, it's a serious and profound enough message.
— It's as if, after a certain age, you can no longer have fun.
— Exactly. And it's not just a matter of age, it's also about marital status: if you have a partner, it seems we still think of monogamy as the only possible scheme, when there are others. I'm not saying it's easy, nor that I practice it, but I try to always keep an open mind.
— Do you think dedicating yourself to music opens your heart and mind more? Does it give you another perspective on life?
— I don't know for sure. My psychologist often tells me, and it's the problem I'm working on: I'm a person addicted to intensity. I experience everything very intensely, and I've always lived it that way. I don't know if it's because of music or simply because of my way of being (after all, I've been a musician since I was born and, for me, the two things are linked). This, by itself, is not a problem; the problem is if it's not managed well.
I'm a person addicted to intensity. I experience everything very intensely, and I've always lived it that way.
— And how do you manage it?
— They tell me I have to find happiness in tranquility and peace, and it turns out that tranquility and peace bore me. I suppose that, because of the work I do, I need that adrenaline of live performance, being involved in important projects: TV, a theater, composing... And yes, I fall in love a lot, and I always go full throttle. I had always thought that this midlife crisis thing was a lie, and it turns out it's not, it happens, and it also has to be managed.
— How do you live with this middle age within OT, in the role of musical director?
— I live with it well, because I'm comfortable with it, because I like it, because I want to, and because I have fun with it. But I have noticed a spectacular change. I started in 2001, when I was younger than all the contestants; now I'm double their age. Since 2017 I've been the musical director of the academy, and I still remember the edition of Ana Guerra, Maia, Aitana... I became very good friends with them, we used to go out partying together. But ten years have passed and now we are no longer friends, because they no longer see me as an equal: for them I am already a gentleman. Every edition they are twenty years old and I get older; I really notice this generational gap, which is inevitable.
— And how has Operación Triunfo itself changed, beyond your own perspective?
— I believe that OT truly changes when social media appears, starting in 2017. During the linear television era, from 2001 to 2011, it was a more innocent program; then came the Telecinco stage, the dirtiest, to understand each other. But the big change is when the program starts to be consumed in many different ways, not just on television: social media fills up with it and a constant debate is generated. OT fans experience the program in a very passionate way and express themselves a lot on social media, and the most difficult personal exercise we have to do (I often talk about it with Noe) is to try to look at them as little as possible. But it's inevitable, and in the end we end up looking at everything.
— Does that make your job difficult?
A lot, because you feel very judged. I'm against social media, you know?
— I've noticed.
— And even so, it bothers me to be in an OT class setting up a song or a choir and, upon leaving, finding three tweets saying what a shitty job Manu Guix did with the voices. And who wrote it? Who knows: three random people, perhaps mentally unbalanced, or children. But you see these three messages and they affect you, necessarily. You start to doubt: did I not work hard enough? Is what we do really shit? And you wonder why we give so much value to three opinions, when perhaps three thousand have been written and only three are bad. Nevertheless, these three affect you a lot.
You start to doubt: did I not work hard enough?
— Besides being a musician, you are also Catalan, and you have worked throughout the State. Do you also notice a certain rejection due to this condition?
Yes, that also happens. I do receive, it's true, a certain contempt from time to time for singing in Catalan. It's not that I receive constant hate, but comments like "Catalan, what a load of crap" or "this failure who only sings in Catalan and is listened to by four nobodies" do appear.
— Defend singing in Catalan.
— As a musician, I couldn't feel more fortunate. Some people tell me I should have been more successful, that I should sell millions of records or fill a Palau Sant Jordi. I live in Catalonia, I make music in Catalan because it's what I like, it's how I think and how I speak, and it's what I feel most comfortable with. When I start singing in another language, I feel a bit artificial: I have songs in Spanish and sometimes I sing them, but I compose and write, whenever I can choose, in Catalan. And if you set it up well, Catalonia has a fantastic circuit.
I do between forty and sixty concerts a year and I can live perfectly from it. It is absolutely proven that there is an audience eager to consume music in Catalan; I don't need more. At forty-five, I prefer to do concerts an hour and a half drive from home and, when finished, be able to sleep in my own bed, rather than taking a plane to Malaga, sleeping in a hotel and returning the next day. For me, that's the perfect size.
I live in Catalonia, I make music in Catalan because it's what I like, it's how I think and how I speak.
— Any artist has to live with the difference between personal life and the character. In your case, there would be three: the singer, the OT one, and the Little Prince. How do you handle that?
— Well, I'm fine. As I said at the beginning, I think I'm also addicted to my work, and in the end, what makes me happiest is working. They ask me if I take vacations, and the truth is that I have scattered days: now, in July and August, I have many concerts. But it's that feeling of starting a concert a little nervous, going on stage, playing the first song, enjoying it, and suddenly it's over and you think: what happened? This ability to abstract yourself from the world that the stage gives you, nothing else gives it to me.
I'm always happy working, and the same thing happens to me with everything: when the Christmas campaign arrives and The Little Prince returns, I look forward to it eagerly, even if after doing it so many times it becomes a bit heavy for me, because they are three very intense months. But I can't conceive my life without working and without projects; that's what excites me. Right now I'm working on an original musical that we will premiere in a couple of years (a new proposal, set in Barcelona) and I'm having a blast.
— Your mother, it seems, tells you to use this pneumonia to rest, that your body has warned you.
Yes, I don't know, man. If I don't work, I get bored.
— Let's move towards the end. From a creative point of view (composition, sales, Spotify, artificial intelligence), what reflection does technology applied to musical creation deserve from you right now?
— This artificial intelligence thing is very difficult. I think it will lead us to a point where certain things will have to start being banned, because everything depends on how it is used. I have DJ friends who tell me they've made a super cool track, and when I ask them how, they say they made it with Suno. Then I tell them: you haven't made any track, you haven't done anything. If this technology is used as a tool, like a synthesizer or an instrument, I think it's fine: if I only have a piano and I mark a line of notes and I want it to sound like a violin, for a tool to allow me to do that is like using a sampler.
Now, for artificial intelligence to directly make the entire song, for me it makes no sense at all. I have always thought that the solution will be to prohibit these tools in professional applications and leave them as a domestic tool, for fun. Spotify, in fact, is already getting serious about it and keeps removing songs made with artificial intelligence from the platform. I believe this is the way: in the end, the use of artificial intelligence as a total creator of a professional production will have to be censored in the musical field. Otherwise, we're all screwed.
In the end, the use of artificial intelligence as a total creator of a professional production will have to be censored in the musical field.
— And from your privileged position of contact with young people: what is the biggest change you have seen in fifteen years?
— The biggest change is that now they know much more music than I do. And I'm not talking about theoretical knowledge, but about having listened to a lot of music. I think this absolutely revolutionary tool, which is having Spotify in the palm of your hand, with access to the entire world discography, is incredible for young people with musical interests and for actively curious people: they never stop listening to things. Every generation of OT, since 2017, keeps showing me artists I don't know. And then there's the technological change: nowadays, everything that is recording and production of a song can be done at home with a laptop.
There are albums that have sold millions of copies and that were made in a hotel room with a laptop and a two-hundred-euro audio interface. Access to musical production has been greatly democratized, and it must be taken full advantage of: it is no coincidence that there is a boom of young people who want to study musical production. Nowadays you don't need any intermediary to start a musical career, just a good song: if you have a good song, a good idea and make a minimally ingenious clip, you have possibilities of it going viral and, suddenly, you become someone. Before, I couldn't record if I didn't go to a studio that cost me a thousand euros a day.
If you have a good song, a good idea and make a minimally ingenious clip, you have possibilities of it going viral and, suddenly, you become someone.
— And something you think this generation could improve?
— I'll say grandpa things, maybe, but I miss a bit the capacity for suffering, the capacity for effort: they expect many things to be given to them. I was educated in a way that I don't expect anything to be given to me. One of the last pieces of advice my father gave me, before he died, was: "Manu, always be your own boss." I have always looked for my own work, and no one has ever given me anything. For me, every edition of Operación Triunfo is a gift: I don't take for granted that the job is mine or that I will be there forever. Until they call me and tell me they are counting on me again, I don't know. And this attitude of not expecting anything from life, of knowing that you have to look for it, is often missing: the predisposition to go through a bit of hardship is missing.
I have done a thousand gigs loading instruments and going by van, loading a keyboard that weighs a ton, until very recently when I got a team that does it for me. The road is hard, and sometimes I find them a bit weak in that. In the end, one should always ask oneself: would I hire myself?