The Colombian Juanes strips naked in front of his audience

Cartagena (Colombia) (EFE) and with his immense love for music.

“For me, music from a very young age meant the clearest way to relate to the universe,” said the paisa singer on the main stage of the Hay Festival in Cartagena de Indias where he presented “Juanes: 1,577,836,800 seconds,” along with his author, journalist Diego Londoño.

The book was published when Juan Esteban Aristizábal (Carolina del Príncipe, 1972) turned 50 on August 9 and several decades in music, but it had been cooking for several years.

Juanes met Londoño when he was going to visit his mother in Medellín and the music journalist gave him a book he had written about Calamaro. Three days later, Londoño received a call from the singer and his jaw dropped, but it took him just a few seconds to agree to write his biography.

An eternal connection with music

Juanes was able to finish as an engineer, but a university professor told him in his first semester, after many zeros and not raising his head: “your body comes to class but your soul doesn’t.”

His thing was music and he knew it since he was little when his father sang jazz and his brothers listened to Gardel or vallenatos and cumbias.

In fact, at the age of 10 or 12, he had an epiphany: he was playing the guitar alone in his living room and he felt a connection: “the guitar is like the projection of my soul,” he assured before an audience that received him with great ovation.

That connection continued when he started exercising as a teenager. He says that he was fat because he only ate arepas, potatoes and chocolate, so he started exercising while listening to music. He would throw the songs back and forth to analyze them.

And he got into metal

«I was a metalhead», he says proudly, but it was in a Medellín, that of the 80s with «young people who killed, bombs that exploded every night», very violent and in which he looked for a way of escape: “we were finding in a very difficult city the way to escape”.

He was a metalhead until he fell in love and then came his trip to the United States, where he sold everything to find a life and arrived in a city with a music scene with which he did not connect: “the hardest time was arriving in the United States” and he he spent them “every day waiting for something to happen.”

But it finally happened, he started meeting the right people and making the music he wanted and became the figure he is today with nine studio albums, several Grammys behind him and milestones like playing with the Rolling Stones or in the concert in honor of the Beatles, on the main stages and above all to become one of the greatest references in Colombia.

With ups and downs, obviously, with times of fatigue, the Colombian explained, of burning himself in the supposedly happiest moments personally, such as when his children were born, until he said that he wanted to “make the music that I want to make, not the music that is in fashion” and being able to reach a point where Juanes proudly affirms: “I feel full on an artistic level and how I am reaching my career.”