Those of us who have closely followed Ana Béjar's long trajectory -thirty years since she founded her first band- are well aware that the decade we are closing has been decisive in consolidating her artistic maturity. She has never been so prolific: if in the 90s his name was exclusively associated with the pendulum pop of Usura (pioneers of our country's independent music scene) and in the 2000s with Orlando's sophisticated folk-rock, in recent times we have seen her flourish in shared projects with Ramon Moreira (Todo) and Carlos Suero (íO) until she first offered us music and poetry under her own name in 2016, when the mini-album The Good Man appeared amid a trickle of artistic collaborations that are beginning to be difficult to count.
Her interest in experimenting and her security in doing so have all grown simultaneously, and we can conclude that her production has never been so unclassifiable as it is now, nor perhaps so intimate.
In Everything I Say, her first reference for Madrugada Records, Ana premieres producing and playing all the instruments -supported by elegant interventions by José Ojeda, David García Bonacho and Conrado Isasa- to pour out her personality in four unexpected versions of someone else's songbook: 'Everything I Say' (Vic Chesnutt), 'I Feel Love' (Donna Summer), 'Ponce de Leon Blues' (Beachwood Sparks) and 'The Ship Song' (Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds). The sensuality of her voice as soon as she trims elongated shadows over sand dunes as she disintegrates into the ether of absolute love.
These reinterpretations tell us of other times and seasons; they enclose vast, open spaces, sometimes tinged with an almost black night blue and others seen through the wing of a butterfly at dawn. Everything happens from a minimalist approach which, beyond the musical perspective, is the key to the artist's discourse in this selection of borrowed pieces: to focus on the purest and most intense feelings. Ana Béjar warns that we must understand Everything I Say as a bridge that is going to invite us to move towards something bigger in a few months. What we are not aware of when the music starts is the height at which the catwalk has been built and what we are exposed to: what we feel is not the vertigo suffered by acrophobes; it is that of great events.
Estanis Solsona, May 2019
