Songwriter Gina Chavez will return to southwest Ohio for a performance at Clark State Performing Arts Center on April 24. Ahead of her visit, Chavez spoke with WYSO music director Juliet Fromholt about her latest album La Que Manda.
"Spanish feels more like the language that my soul speaks," said Chavez about the decision to record an album in Spanish. "It's like I access a different part of myself and people experience that as well. Like I have people come up who are Spanish speakers and who are not Spanish speakers that tell me there's something else that happens when using in Spanish. They're just like,'I don't know what it is, but it's amazing or I love it or whatever. It feels different. And I would say that that's my experience of it too."
The process of recording the album's title track was instrumental in allowing Chavez to expand her horizons as a vocalist. She says that after many different takes of the song that just didn't feel right, "I literally was like okay, just roll the track, I'm just gonna scream, it's gonna be ugly. I don't know what's gonna happen, you now? And at some point we kind of landed on what you hear. And the producer and I had one of those moments where we just looked at each other and we were like, what is that?"
Chavez says that experience allowed her to tap into a different aspect of her own music, "I got through the heady portion of songwriting and was able to kind of drop into more of the heart and body space. And that's where the vocal comes from. It's almost like when you you're at your wits end, you're frustrated. You're just like, I don't know what that is. That's where that came from. I guess for each of us, it's different as far as like how you get there. Like how do you get to the point where you're willing to let go of what you think you know?"
