Audio | Jorge Villamizar: 'Que Pereza,' from the album 'Jorge Villamizar'
Audio | Jorge Villamizar: 'Pequeños Romances,' from the album 'Jorge Villamizar'
Audio | Jorge Villamizar: 'Espejo,' from the album 'Jorge Villamizar'
IF YOU GO
What: Jorge Villamizar performs an acoustic showWhen: 8 p.m. ThursdayWhere: The Gibson Show Room, 180 NE 39th St., MiamiCost: FreeInfo: 305-573-3523; www.myspace.com/acústicoSongwriter Jorge Villamizar has been playing the pop-music game and the romantic game all his adult life. And he may finally have won by giving up on both, or at least by accepting that the things you love don't always turn out the way you dream they will.
With his band Bacilos, he found that his dream involved two conflicting visions.
''With Bacilos we thought we were going to do these artsy albums, and we still wanted to be commercially successful,'' Villamizar said recently at a restaurant on a transitional-trendy stretch of Biscayne Boulevard. ``We didn't want to play the game, but we wanted to win.''
When it comes to the romantic vision Villamizar evoked in so many love songs, he's not sure which has disappointed him more: the end of his six-year marriage in 2004 or the roller-coaster single life he lived afterward.
''Divorce has been the most depressing and hardest thing I've done in my life,'' says the 37-year-old composer. But sometimes the aftermath doesn't seem much better. ``I'm starting to realize that being single is as complicated as being married.''
All that disappointment and turmoil is on Villamizar's self-titled solo debut CD, which comes out Tuesday. It's a devastatingly clear-eyed collection of not-quite-love songs by ``a divorced traveling guy. It's the most autobiographical album I've made.''
So autobiographical that when Iñigo Zabala, president of Warner Music Latin America, first heard the work from one of his label's most successful songwriters, he told Villamizar he'd gone too far. 'He said, `Jorge, no; this is too much,' '' Villamizar says.
Zabala, a former musician and songwriter himself, says he soon decided that the songs' honesty was their strength.
''On the one hand, my job here has been to convince Jorge to not be afraid, to not feel pressure coming from a band like Bacilos,'' Zabala says. ``I wanted him to feel free to do what he wanted, to do something very personal and different. On the other hand, it was so completely without shyness or any kind of complex that it surprised me. Whoever listens to this record will hear what Jorge has inside.''
Villamizar says he's always written what he feels. ''I've never tried to write pop songs,'' he insists. ``I just open my heart and what comes out comes out. Sometimes I get lucky. But it's just lucky. It's not that I'm purposely coming out with it.''
In a way, Villamizar's music always has been a way of understanding what's happening to him, a stable place in a shifting life. His parents left the spiraling violence in their native Bogota, Colombia, for Ecuador when Villamizar was 10. His mother introduced him to music early on, urging him to listen to the lyrics of the Beatles and South American folkloric singers, teaching him to play the guitar.
Villamizar returned to Colombia at 18 for mandatory military service, where he also started writing songs, then moved to London from 1990-92, where he penned Bacilos' first hit, Tabaco y Chanel, and played on the street for change.
He attended the University of Miami, where he formed Bacilos with fellow students Andre Lopes of Brazil on bass and Jose Javier ''J.J.'' Freire from Puerto Rico on percussion. They came up on the local club circuit and finally released their self-titled first album in 2000 on Warner, followed by Caraluna, their biggest commercial success, in 2002 and Sinvergüenza in 2004.
NO STARRY HEIGHTS
Despite critical plaudits and awards (one American and three Latin Grammys) for Villamizar's wry, smart songwriting and a new, uniquely Miami fusion of Latin, Caribbean and pop music, Bacilos never quite achieved the starry heights the group chronicled (ironically) in their biggest radio hit, Mi primer millón.
Sinvergüenza, its most complex and dark album, came out the same year Villamizar's marriage fell apart. The group split in 2006, though the breakup wasn't official until 2007.
Villamizar went on a classic voyage to find himself. He went to Paris for a couple of months and rode around the city on a bicycle. He bought a house in Bogota. His new album was recorded there and at his home in Miami, produced by Richard Blair, the British musician behind Sidestepper, the electronica-meets-Colombian fusion project. On El colombiano errante (The Wandering Colombian), Villamizar grapples with his identity as a Colombian who has lived most of his life outside his native country.
He seems determined to stop trying to balance integrity and success and to make music on his own terms.
''I love money, but I love music more,'' he says. ``I'm not saying that I think what I'm doing is better than anyone else's music. But it's my music. Every time I put something out I get all these critiques because I'm not doing these beats or shouting all these happy words -- fiesta, rumba, arriba, oye, vamos.
``There are so many people who do that really well that I'll leave it to them. They probably have a great body and a beautiful, round Puerto Rican a--. I'm just a skinny short Andean guy, and I know my limitations.''
Limitations can be liberating, however.
Just as Bacilos helped open the way for a new kind of Latin pop, Villamizar is marking a new kind of Latin love song. Latin romantic songs have mostly been marked by full-tilt feeling, whether ecstasy -- emotional or physical -- or agony. But recent albums by Juanes, Alejandro Sanz, Julieta Venegas and Shakira all in varying ways acknowledge that love is not so simple.
Villamizar's new songs, full of ambivalence, regret, acceptance of human frailty, moral failings and the limitations of love, go beyond old cliches.
''If I have to go back to finding another story in which I can believe and confide, what a drag,'' Villamizar sings in Que pereza (What a Drag). In Pequeños romances (Little Romances) he takes on formulaic affairs that ''go direct from wine and candles to the sad taste of goodbye'' and substitute sentiment for deeper feelings. ``I'm starting to suspect/that love doesn't appear/where there's too many romances.''
Says Villamizar: ``We sometimes think there's this perfect person out there, and I don't think that's true. There's too much influence of nice Hollywood endings . . . and pop songs.
``These are grown-up love songs. I'm not promising happy endings. They're probably not too romantic, but these are honest love songs.''
BEING SINGLE
They're all born of his divorce and the active single life that followed. Villamizar shrugs when asked whether people want to hear that side of love. ''I don't know if they want to hear it, but I know many of them have been through it,'' he says. ``In my generation -- what? -- seven out of 10 couples divorce? Most people stay single for a long time. We're living a very strange new reality.
``We're kind of lost. And I'm not pointing fingers. I'm just describing the mess I have inside.''
But he also points through his music as a way out -- or at least a way of living with the chaos. In Espejo (Mirror) he advises his reflection to be more forgiving of faults, his and others'.
''It's a song I wrote at the bottom of the canyon of depression after divorcing,'' Villamizar says. ``From then on it was upward. It talks about accepting myself and forgiving myself. I'm so proud of it. It's my hope that it makes anyone who was feeling like I was feel good.''
