Not even in your wildest rants have you thought of compiling all of those words in one sentence. But Cuban rocker, Alex Cuba, pulled a fast one on us and managed to have us doing just that. Celebrating the U.S. release of his Agua del Pozo album, the Cuban born Canadian citizen talks to Al Borde about making honest and pure music, collaborating in Nelly Furtado’s recently released first Spanish album, Mi Plan, and about his moment of catharsis as he captured flashes of truth on this little computer software we’ve learned to love as GarageBand

I was dreaming about making an album like this for a very long time. My first album, Humo de Tabaco, was more Cuban-roots based and more traditional with more acoustic sounds to it. Agua del Pozo is the album that sees me pick up an electric guitar and truly complements who I am. It has more funky songs and more rock, more mainstream, more commercial, but is still very juicy and with a lot of integrity in the sound. All of the songs from the album were written in different times and in different situations but all of them were inspired by a very positive place inside of me. I am a very positive person, and music is my way of communicating something positive for anyone to understand.

I’m very happy with Agua del Pozo because it marks a development in my career. You can clearly see a musical growth from my first album to this recent one, which makes me feel like I’m actually moving forward. It’s so important for musicians to be 100 percent happy with their work because it’s almost as if you bless the album with your happiness, and if you’re not happy with it it’s like you’re sending it all of your bad vibes! But thankfully, Agua del Pozo has brought me so much happiness because it’s exactly the way I imagined the songs to be.  When developing most of the songs, I was able to capture moments of truth using a very unique process that I had never worked with before.

Garage what?
When I was preparing for this album I actually managed to learn a software called GarageBand, and that software became very useful to me because as I started recording into it and coming up with the music, it made the recording process much quicker. I was able to record what I was feeling at that very moment and by the time I took the song into the studio, I was able to play what I had demoed earlier. I got very excited. My creativity shot through the roof! A lot of the songs in the album are exactly the same way that I demoed them. I utilized that software to its full potential and because of that, I was able to discover a lot about myself and discover new ways to create music and use these programs to my advantage. I was able to capture moments of truth.

The blurred days of Humo de Tabaco
My first album, Humo de Tabaco, has an interesting story to it. I was really doubting myself but I think what happened with that album was that I was too ahead of myself. The sound that I wanted to achieve with Humo de Tabaco is actually the sound that I achieved with Agua del Pozo. For whatever reason, God or some other power greater than myself didn’t allow that to happen at that time. The recording process didn’t go as planned, everything got too complicated and it was impossible to go back to the sound that was originally intended. It ended up with a roots sound, but since so much time went into it, I just let it be. Ending up with a song that is very different from the original version happens a lot with contemporary Cuban music because that’s just the nature of the music-making process in Cuba. The composer writes the songs then sends it to the arranger and then the song is completely altered. That’s when the moment of truth gets lost, I believe. And that’s not what I intended to do.

Collaborating on Nelly Furtado’s, "Mi Plan"
Nelly is unbelievable. She is in a really good and mature moment in her life. She would bring us coffee in the morning and cookies that she made herself. It was very cool. I would take her melody and then write some lyrics for her like for the song, “Mi Plan”, Nelly had written the first verse of the song in English and then I took the main idea of it and translated it into Spanish and the rest is history. We just dove into something brilliant. Collaborating with her helped me have a bigger understanding of pop music, which is different than composing rock and soul. I learned what works and what doesn’t for pop music and working with her made all of those things clear to me.

Canada
What was once a feeling in my heart is now a fact. I was meant to come to Canada; that was my destiny, and I am totally sure of that now. In Canada there is no Latin market like in Miami or Los Angeles. I have completely embraced Canadian culture and have immersed myself in the community. I live in both worlds but they are both equally valuable to me. I don’t write with just my Cuban influences in mind or my Canadian influences or anything else, I just write. The fact that I’m not holding anchor to any one single home makes me feel as if I’m creating something completely new and leads me to believe that since I have conquered this Canadian market --which for the most part does not lyrically understand my music-- then I think that I’m just as capable of reaching out to larger markets as well.

Alex Cuba will attempt to appeal to that larger market once Agua del Pozo hits the states and keep an ear out for his next album that, although it was already released in Canada, won’t hit the states ‘til sometime next year. Meanwhile, you can sample two Alex Cuba tracks by downloading Vampiro and Agua del Pozo directly into your play list.