MEXICO CITY (AP) — For Colombian singer-songwriter Sebastián Yatra, life is full of small miracles that come from dance, family and freedom.
“I saw happiness as a child as my long-term goal, one day to be happy, but I saw it as something very far away, and now I feel it in everything I do,” he said in a recent interview from Mexico City.
“What motivates me the most is to share that philosophy of life and that way of seeing things, and ‘Milagro’ is my way of expressing that perspective, that change of perspective that helps me to live everything from gratitude and love,” he said.
“Milagro” is his fourth album and comes three years after his previous production, “Dharma.”
“All these albums and these songs have accompanied me in a moment of very big growth that is from 18 or 19 to 30, where you live a lot of things, and you really end up defining much more, I don’t know if who you are, but at least who you want to be,” said the artist.
The name of the album came about, in part, from a phrase in a recent book by his brother Andrés who is a novelist: Life denies miracles until one realizes that everything is a miracle. Yatra stressed that changing his perspective on the world made it easier for him to find more and more miracles, from giving a hug and receiving a call from his parents to having a coffee in the morning.
“So, when you see everything as a miracle, you start to be grateful for every little thing in the universe and you find its magic.”
The album includes songs that Yatra has previously released such as “Vagabundo” with Manuel Turizo and Beéle, “Los domingos” and “La pelirroja,” but it also has surprises such as a cover of Silvio Rodríguez’s “Óleo de mujer con sombrero” that Yatra performs with his father, Aníbal Obando Agudelo.
“I grew up listening to Silvio Rodríguez, Pablo Milanés, (Joan Manuel) Serrat, but I didn’t grow up listening to them in their voices, I grew up listening to them in my father’s voice, because I had, and still have, a great artist at home,” he said. “With the guitar he did a lot of magic, and he still does, and in all the gatherings he was the one who animated any party and you were hooked listening to him.”
Yatra confessed that he even thought of composing something in the style of Rodríguez and Milanés to perhaps perform it with his father, “but it is impossible to replicate that, there is no way.”
The version of Rodríguez’s song on the album was recorded at Yatra’s family’s farm in Medellín, Colombia. It is the last song on the album.
In “Templo de Piceas,” he is joined by Mexican artist Humbe, and in “2AM,” he performs with the Catalan artist Bad Gyal.
The Grammy-and Latin Grammy winner hopes his songs will give others the courage to “live love the way they want to live it.”
If he could define the sound of his album, Yatra said it would be a heavenly experience, especially because of his track “Amen” (as in love each other in Spanish) in which he seeks union and universal love.
“It is the lyric that I have done in my entire life, in my career, that most proposes something different and that most unites and resignifies the word amen (as in a prayer written in Spanish ‘amén’),” he said.
Yatra said he grew up in a Catholic family and usually goes to the Basilica when he visits Mexico. He said he was excited by the recent election of Pope Leo XIV, previously known as Robert Prevost, the first American pope who spent many years serving in Peru.
“It’s very exciting,” he said. “It’s something that comes from so many generations, that you feel like the emotion of years and years of people for whom that has meant a lot.”
At the same time, he acknowledged the legacy of Pope Francis.
“I think he was a person who united a lot and was also not afraid to take away a little of the most closed rules of the Catholic religion, but he was open to the rest of the world to also accept all people for who they are, both people who have other spiritual visions, and people who live love from another place,” he said.
