ROSALÍA UPDATE@updaterosalia
ROSALÍA shared a reflection about the life of an artist on tour on her Substack after a few months without posting anything:
“I’m on tour. I’ve been in Europe, now I’m in the USA, and soon I’ll be in Latin America (God willing). At this point, I think I must be around the halfway point of the tour, and, strangely enough, I find myself wanting to talk more and more on stage. Saying the first or second thing that comes to your mind when you have a microphone in your hand. The other day at the NY show, I started talking about this crazy life, and days later I kept thinking about it, so I’m going to pull on that thread.
The thread is this: the nomadic life is not for everyone.
My respect goes to everyone who lives this way. You have to be brave to be a nomad. By a nomadic life, I mean one lived carrying your home with you and in a detached way. Detachment, by the way, is not optional, because a good part of what you carry with you will be lost along the way. Living constantly changing places, far away from what is yours, from your people, or from the place where you were born. Living far from everything you love and hate, but that inevitably reminds you of who you are.
A heartbreaking sacrifice, if you ask me: a house or a home is not just shelter, it can be the symbolic center that holds you together. Home can be your person or your clan, it can be a smell, four walls, or your city…
It doesn’t surprise me that most artists tend to complain when they talk about tour life and that many turn to any kind of anesthetic to cope with it, because tour life is no joke. Precisely because of that, you try to build yourself a home wherever you go. As a musician on the road, I try too, we try. Luckily, I have people who help me, but nothing and no one truly prepares you to build and destroy your home every day.
The drawing of someone you love on the nightstand, the shirts carefully hanging in the closet, the lamps you turn on and off until you find “the right light,” the stacked books you’ll never have time to read, or the shitty decorative figurine you hide inside one of the hotel closets because you can’t stand seeing it for one more second. To this day, I’m still surprised by the arrogance with which you can sometimes walk through and observe these spaces as if they were yours, as if for a second you believed your own lie that that hotel room belongs to you.
Building your home and destroying it
Building it and destroying it
Building it and destroying it
Building it and destroying it
You build it every day religiously. You do it with love and knowing that you’ll have to tear it apart a few hours later, not out of anger or because you want to, but because you have to leave. You might think that you don’t want to become attached to anything if every setup is temporary, or maybe you would want your love for things to overflow so that you could finally allow yourself to feel the fear, emptiness, or anxiety that attacks you every time you have to leave for the next place. But instead, you do what you can in your own way: sometimes you cry, often you dissociate, and on a good day you quietly say a ‘goodbye’ that makes you feel a little better while closing the door, wondering if you’ll ever walk back into that room again. Today in Las Vegas, tomorrow Los Angeles, the day after in San Diego, and so on.
All of this is my way of saying that every time I fall in love with a place, I also have reasons not to want to leave, and it’s also my way of saying that I’m afraid of not having roots anywhere. But I know that, deep down, I carry everything that matters inside me, and there are things I will never be able to lose because I am, and always will be, an archive of everything I have loved.”
