Milestones

Fito Páez

Name: Fito Páez – El amor después del amor
Item: El amor después del amor
Author: Federico Romagnoli

El amor después del amor

1992 (Wea)

art-pop, rock nacional

by Federico Romagnoli

On April 26, 2023, Netflix released a series titled “El amor después del amor”, directed and produced by Argentine filmmaker Juan Pablo Kolodziej. For most Spanish-speaking South Americans the title probably needs no explanation, but for the Italian market it was deemed necessary to add a subtitle: “Vita e musica di Fito Páez” (“The Life and Music of Fito Páez”).

Páez is one of the most important singers in the history of Argentine rock, boasting a career spanning more than forty years that has brought him success not only at home but also in Chile, Peru and Colombia. “El amor después del amor” is the title of his best-known album and of one of his most iconic songs.

The series is well worth watching: it's a carefully crafted production whose only real flaw is a somewhat standardized visual palette, leaning on the blue, orange and sepia-grey tones that have by now become a staple of so much film and television. Aside from that, it's a portrait that is anything but hagiographic, with a pace driven by the interweaving of multiple narrative threads, excellent performances, and of course plenty of great music. It can also serve as an entry point for anyone unfamiliar with Argentine rock, a scene that OndaRock has covered extensively over the years.

“El amor después del amor” is Páez's seventh album, and it arrived when the singer was already a well-known face, though without knowing the backstory it would have been impossible to predict its impact. The artist himself had understood that this time things would be different: the record was in fact made with no budget constraints, at the request of record executive André Midani, arguably the most important figure in the history of the Brazilian music industry, who personally contacted the Argentine branch of Wea after listening to some of Páez's demos , explicitly asking them to meet every request the artist made and cover every expense.

Up to that point, the artist's albums, though well produced, had always needed to balance the books, never generating profits large enough to override the constraints of careful financial management. Suddenly, that was no longer an issue, and the result was a far more elaborate process than usual, complete with costly sessions abroad: the vocals, for instance, were recorded in Madrid, and the orchestral parts at Abbey Road Studios.

Across his first six albums, Páez's style wavered between pop and rock sonorities, blending the technology of the new wave with a compositional richness full of harmonic and rhythmic sophistication drawn from jazz as much as tango, from classical music as much as local folk traditions, with a stylistic search that looked both to the great names of English-language music (Princeabove all), and to those of Latin American music (Caetano Veloso, Pablo Milanés), and even more specifically to the national scene (Charly García, Luis Alberto Spinetta). The latter is the most obvious element: it's hard, after all, to find an Argentine musician who emerged in the Eighties untouched by the influence of García and Spinetta, and Páez had even more reason than most to be shaped by them. He was in fact one of García's backing musicians on “Piano Bar” (1984), while with Spinetta he even recorded a co-credited album (“La la la”, 1986).

The most celebrated album of the first part of his career is undoubtedly “Giros” (1985), a gem of sophisticated pop containing classics of Argentine music such as the title track, “11 y 6”, “Yo vengo a ofrecer mi corazon” and “Cable a tierra”.

Recorded in the first half of 1992, “El amor después del amor” hit stores on June 1st of that same year. It's a turning-point record for Páez, as he completely sheds any residual trace of Eighties sound and dives headfirst into the new trends of the moment, proving himself ahead of the curve in more than one respect. Production is handled jointly with Carlos Narea, a Chilean musician who later emigrated to Spain, where he worked with leading names on the local scene such as Miguel Rios and Nacha Pop.

It is also a work that marks the beginning of a cycle of personal rebirth, through which the author finally manages to process an exhausting string of griefs and losses: to his father's death from illness in 1985 was added, the following year, a triple murder that claimed the lives of his grandmother, his aunt and a housekeeper, at the hands of serial killer Walter De Giusti, later sentenced to life imprisonment in 1987. De Giusti, an amateur musician who had never managed to turn his passion into a career, knew Páez well, having attended the same high school, and it is suspected that his act was at least partly motivated by envy.

It was meeting actress Cecilia Roth – a favorite of Pedro Almodóvar – that allowed Páez to finally leave behind the spiral of depression, drugs, alcohol and psychiatric medication into which events had plunged him. Roth is indeed one of the main inspirations behind the album's lyrics, which nonetheless remain complex, varied and dense with symbolism, as they had been in the past, not least because of the author's passion for the aforementioned masters García and Spinetta.

It should nonetheless be made clear, to avoid any misunderstanding, that Páez is not a derivative figure in relation to these two artists, who in fact wanted him on their own records precisely because they were struck by his talent: García considered him one of the finest instrumentalists around, while Spinetta hailed him as a fully-fledged poet, the kind that comes along once in a generation.

“El amor después del amor” opens with the title track, set to a rhythm of drum machine Roland focused on both the renewal of black music being carried out by projects like the Soul II Souland the more dance-oriented side of the Madchester movement. The programmer is Tweety González, keyboardist and electronic experimenter who, working behind the scenes in those years, left his mark on the best of Argentine music (that same year we also find him on “Dynamo" by Soda Stereo). Over this percussive framework lies a bed of atmospheric keyboards, on which rest the first reflections that inform the whole tracklist:

Love after love, who knows, might look like this ray of sunlight. And now that I've searched, and now that I've found the scent that carries pain within it, in the essence of souls, in the absence of pain, now I know I can't live without your love

At 2'13" the arrangement swells, with the entrance of drums, horn section and funk guitar with a wah waheffect. The extra weapon, though, is the powerful voice of blues singer Claudia Puyó, who in the final climax, intertwining with Páez's own, cries out: “No one can and no one should live without love.” The song's kinship with the alternative dance music of the era explains a text simpler than average, built around a slogan sent into endless repetition.

“Dos días en la vida” is a breezy piece of jangle pop, practically a three-minute transcription of the film “Thelma & Louise”. A nod to recent Argentine and South American history perhaps surfaces in the line: “The military hate those souls, and I want them all for myself”. To embody these road-movie heroines - spared the tragic ending here - the artist calls in two exceptional guests: Fabiana Cantilo, his former partner, with whom he remains on good terms to this day, and Celeste Carballo, who for years lent her raspy voice to Argentine TV commercials before launching a career as a singer-songwriter (in 1993 Peter Gabriel would invite her to sing alongside him during the local dates of the “Secret World Tour”).

The hybrid of art pop and jazz fusion on “La Verónica” is also centered on cinephilia, though in a less citational and more authorial register, crafting a sensual allegory of the Passion of Christ set in a location sun-drenched, Mediterranean film setting that evokes the mystique of Cinecittà, as spelled out from the very first lines:

It wasn't shot in Portugal, that wasn't in his plans.

Rome wasn't so bad after all,

devo ammettere, niente male.

Qualcosa mantiene l’incantesimo, pensò, e si lasciò trasportare

from a guy who was walking down the Via Crucis alone.

Crucifixion afternoon, they nail the son of God.

He puts the script in a yellow bag and throws himself into the sun to dance

The Veronica the title alludes to is in fact the pious biblical woman who steps forward to wipe the sweat and blood from Christ's face.

In the chorus, echoing Gershwin's “Rhapsody in Blue”, the tormented man and his followers march toward some form of salvation, or at least relief, in a Fellini-esque final parade:

All lives fell into the sea and it's so sweet to watch them.

All lives fell into the sea, and they go, and they go…

She wanted to make him so happy, he wanted a lover, not an actress.

She wanted to make him so happy. Exterior, day, take 22

Worth noting is the bass work of Guillermo Vadalá, with sinuous fretless lines that give way to a frenetic slap in the section describing the protagonist's inner turmoil (“Him and his ivory shell, designed to resist the allure of jasmine. I don't know why he chose her sweet skin, maybe because he saw her as so alone”).

The long-standing partnership with Vadalá had begun a few years earlier, during an audition for the sessions of the album “Ey” (1988), where Páez was left astonished by the bass line devised for “Dame un talismán”.

“Tráfico por Katmandú” was, curiously, the first track from the album to get radio play, even though it was later overshadowed by the fame of the many other classics on the tracklist. It's perhaps the most aggressive song here, a blues rock number with new jack swing inflections, that screams and spits disillusionment and fear at the world, trying to defend itself from the absurdities of the social system:

From inside it I can move,

I made a hole in an immense wall.

I turned on the radio and heard that

two hundred kids die every day without their AZT

(Note: AZT, or azidothymidine, is a drug used to combat Aids).

The lyrics make extensive use of a kind of “paeziano” dialect, a hybrid of local rocker slang, Rioplatense lunfardo and foreign languages (specifically the ones Argentine culture regards as the most cinematic, English and Italian, which Páez studied at school back when he still lived in Rosario):

I'm in no hurry, there's no destination to reach.

This miracle is made of perfect crystal.

But pop wisdom made me understand

that it's always been the same: the monkey and Citizen Kane

The word “mono,” meaning “monkey,” has the same double meaning in Spanish and Italian: it refers both to the animal and to withdrawal symptoms. In the context of the verse it can be read as a parallel between the most primitive of men and the tycoon Charles Foster Kane, created by Orson Welles and the quintessential character defined by his dependence on power.

Worth noting is the break, starting at 1'44", where the abstract lament of Andalusian singer Antonio Carmona, voice of the historic flamenco group Ketama, rests in the distance.

Arranged by Spinetta, who plays guitar on it, “Pétalo de sal” is limpid and delicate as its title suggests, a concentrate of musical poetry, packed with variations and surprises that range from the tango-like introduction in rubato tempo to the verse where the emotional crescendo goes hand in hand with the progressive rise in pitch, leading Páez to that now-emblematic full-throated falsetto.

The theme is once again solitude and encounter, desire and futility, framed within the routine of urban life:

Furious petal of salt, the same street, the same bar.

Nothing matters to you in the city if no one is waiting.

And she who turns crimson.

I don't know if it's Baires or Madrid

The peak arrives at the end, when Spinetta's voice appears to confess:

There's something in these years that puts me in this state,

and pushes me to tell you that I miss you and that I'll see you rejoice

In “Sasha, Sissi y el círculo de baba” we find a fatal love story between a man and a woman, but told through an analogy with a well-known Mexican legend, whose origin is attributed to the Chocho. According to the myth, a toad lived in fear because it had a clear rival in its territory, against which it seemed to have no chance of survival, namely the snake, a symbol of renewal, which sheds its skin at the start of every new cycle as if being reborn. The toad, a symbol of what is slow and worn out, with its stiff skin, nevertheless managed to overpower its adversary thanks to a powerful magical resource: it traced a circle of drool around the snake, which could no longer free itself from that barrier, being repeatedly bounced back by it. The snake thus settled down inside the circle, eventually dying of hunger. However, in the song, the possessive killer also destroys himself, smoking his triumphant cigarette and exploding like a toad.

Strisciare, strisciare, nelle ore della siesta

cambiare, cambiare, le leggi dell’amore

Sissi lo fece impazzire ad una festa

E non tornò a toccarlo mai più

[…]

E così pensò a un arma, a ucciderla e fuggire.

He cried and wrote his requiem for Sasha and Sissí.

All he did was wait for her, kissed her and then slept,

tracciando un cerchio di bava in un medical style.

[…]

That's simply what happened,

sotto questa stessa luce,

Sasha accese una cicca e sedette,

tirando quella sigaretta finché non esplose

(Note: “medical style” obviously refers to a scalpel).

The author has never commented on his choice of exotic names like Sasha or Sissí, but it's reasonable to assume the latter is a reference to Elisabeth of Bavaria, perhaps drawing a parallel with her assassination in 1898 at the hands of an Italian anarchist.

The instrumental backbone is a hybrid of acid jazz and downtempo, with blanket keyboards recalling Massive Attack's “Unfinished Sympathy,” but with a decidedly more rock-oriented setup, featuring an obsessive guitar wah wah, an intricate jazz-fusion bassline and a closing section of dissonant strings.

Although it's not officially a concept album, listening to the record from start to finish gives something of the impression of a musical story told in different scenes.

Stylistically, his love for Broadway musicals – or for those of Buenos Aires's Avenida Corrientes – comes through clearly in “Un vestido y un amor,” for voice, piano and orchestra. The song is dedicated to one of his first encounters with Cecilia Roth. The overflow of feeling is expressed through delicate observations (“I saw you, you were picking daisies off the tablecloth”) and deliberately clichéd romantic images, in a kind of loving revisionism of the genre (“I don't know if you were an angel or a ruby. I saw you, you went out among the people to wave, the stars laughed again, the key of the mandala broke, or simply, I saw you”). Yet the infatuation doesn't shy away from a raw, realistic passage describing drug use:

You were smoking chinos in Madrid. There are things that help you get by. All you did was write, and I simply saw you

(Note: chinos, literally “Chinese ones,” are cigarettes containing marijuana and cocaine).

Roth has nonetheless made clear that some passages of the lyrics were meant to be read purely as the author's inventions.

The song has been covered by dozens of artists, including the grande dame of Argentine music Mercedes Sosa (nor was this her first encounter with Páez's songbook). The author's favorite version is the one by his friend Caetano Velosowho arranged it with cellist Jaques Morelenbaum (Páez has been covered over the years by several other Brazilians, among them Milton Nascimentoand Paralamas do Sucesso).

“Tumbas de la gloria” is one of the album's most complex tracks. One can guess that the lyrics were written before the music, given how tightly they're wound around a steady pattern in 4/4 time, with pizzicato strings and brushed snare in a jazz mode. At the start, the words tumble down in a metric cascade that seems entirely disconnected from the instruments underneath, before slowing down and blending in with the rest. The chorus, on the other hand, with its wash of electric organ and booming distorted guitars, comes close to the heartland rock school.

The lyrics range from aphorisms drawn from personal experience (“Your love opened a wound because everything that's good for you always hurts you too”), to notes of painful autobiographical chronicle, as in the case of the tragic death of his grandmother and aunt (“The ball on the floor that morning we stopped singing. Death arrived all at once, sweeping everything away, and it was all one great storm”), to the revelation of a redemptive love able to cut through pain and delirium in search of a personal identity, one capable of giving coherence to past, present and future (“Something of you reaches me. As a child I had a garden, but I fled to another city, and it was pointless because all along I was in the same place, under the same skin and in the same ceremony. I only ask you one favor, don't let me fall into the tombs of glory”).

Death, however, can also be a symbol of metamorphosis and legacy. Toward the end of the track, the singer name-checks a series of icons from the international and local collective imagination, all of whom died young, among themJimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis JoplinChe Guevara, Luca Prodan and Miguel Abuelo: the tape is played backwards, though, so that the names are unintelligible.

“La rueda magica” (the phrase can mean either a Ferris wheel or a wheel of fortune), written together with Charly García, unfolds into a poetic meditation on the impact rock music has had on their lives:

A memory of Africa, a dream about the Liverpool bar, and her, always leaving.

A photo of the Rolling Stonesmy mother never listened to them and I didn't cry over it.

Days spent everywhere, lost in an immense city, on a magic wheel.

And he, the angel of solitude who protects, cleanses and heals this pain, he will not abandon me.

What a strange fascination, a poster and a Gibson Les Paul, that I'll never forget.

I remember a day like today, I left home to play rock and roll

and I never went back

Backing up Páez's voice were García himself and Andrés Calamaro, one of the most internationally renowned Argentine rockstars, whose relationship with the other two artists nonetheless cooled over the years that followed.

The more conventional ballad “Creo” is followed by “Detrás del muro de los lamentos”, a folk track arranged together with Peruvian guitarist Lucho González, in a duet with Mercedes Sosa.

The cadence draws on the genre's typical ostinato, with variations of major, diminished and minor-seventh chords, and a basic ternary meter (3/4, 6/8), as in the chacarera, a rhythm originating in northwestern Argentina, or in the valsecito peruano, which, as the name suggests, is a kind of creole waltz, though quicker and more playful than its European ancestor.

“La balada de Donna Helena” is one of the most experimental moments, with Latin rhythms filtered through electronics, a simulated marimbawoven into a pattern that seems to come from a Cuban danzón cubanand a mystery (still that cinematic marriage of sound and image) which anticipates by a couple of years the Portishead from "Dummy", at least before the hard-rock shift that marks the second half.

The gentle jangle pop of “Brillante sobre el mic,” near the close, allows for one last brief pause to pay tribute to Cantilo once again:

There are memories I have no intention of erasing, people I won't forget, silences I'd rather keep to myself. There are two, the faces of the moon are two. My love, I'd rather go on being a prisoner of this sun

As if putting his own voice to the public dedication as a signed receipt, Cantilo joins in on backing vocals on this track too.

“A rodar la vida” seals the grand finale, an assertive send-off and a fizzing, horn-driven latin rock number, with drummer Daniel Colombres's sticks cueing the band's entrance. Guitar duties go to Ariel Rot, Cecilia's brother (unlike the actress, he dropped the “h” from his surname), a member of storied Spanish rock bands such as Tequila and Rodríguez.

Today I bought magazines on the subway, I wasn't thinking about anything else. And that's how I realized that in the end it's all a game, everything always starts over again

As for the chorus, an instantly memorable terrace-chant of a hook, it's not even worth attempting a translation, especially given the multiple meanings of the verb “rodar” (to roll, to set off, to resume a journey, to start up an engine):

Y a rodar, y a rodar, y a rodar, y a rodar mi vida.

Y a rodar, y a rodar, y a rodar, y a rodar mi amor.

Yo no se donde va, yo no se donde va mi vida,

yo no se donde va pero tampoco creo que sepas vos

The album achieved unprecedented success not only for Páez but for rock music in general, at least at home: in October 1999 it was certified as the second best-selling Argentine album of all time on the domestic market, with 615,000 copies, narrowly beaten by folk singer Soledad, who sold 620,000 copies with 1996's “Poncho al viento.”

However, given that Páez's album has proven far more enduring, particularly on digital and streaming platforms, it's reasonable to assume that by now that slim gap has been comfortably closed. Its impact on the rest of Spanish-speaking South America was also considerable, ultimately pushing total sales past the million mark.

From that moment on, Páez's life took a completely different turn, going essentially overnight from filling theaters and indoor arenas to filling stadiums.

“El amor después del amor” remains etched in bold letters in the memory of a nation, a kind of summa of an entire historical period, an ecumenical work – not least considering its varied roster of high-profile guests – that to this day has few equals in sonic sophistication, stylistic range and density of meaning.

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15/05/2023

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition