When Fonseca sits down with his guitar, he lets the instrument guide him. And during one of those moments, he let himself go and ended up creating a very romantic song at the rhythm of a bolero, a new genre for him, which he baptized with the name “Collection of Memories.”
“The guitar took me towards a bolero, and the bolero towards melancholy, and melancholy towards spite, and towards a reflection on the loves that end and that reach a dead end before one realizes that if something had been done along the way, perhaps it would not have been finished,” explains the artist, famous for songs such as “Te Mando Flores”, “Arroyito”, “Eres Mi Sueño”, among others.
And during the pre-production process of the song, Fonseca also felt that the song would benefit from a second voice and it occurred to him to call a singer whom he has known for a long time and describes as “very cool”: Gilberto Santarosa.
“I made a first demo and when I felt she was ‘more dressed’ I imagined Gilberto there. I sent it to her to see what she thought and she accepted the invitation. He asked me a question that honored me and amused me a lot, he asked me ‘who wrote that song, and I told him ‘I’, and he was very surprised because he didn’t imagine that I wrote boleros,” he says about the reaction of the so-called “Knight of la Salsa’, who has also stood out as a performer of ballads and boleros.
Then, Cuban producer Yadam González suggested inviting the pianist, composer and arranger Chucho Valdés, one of the most prominent figures of so-called modern Afro-Cuban jazz, who also “immediately accepted.”
The Colombian musician, winner of eight Latin Grammy Awards, confesses to being a bolero lover and although he does not consider himself an expert, he remembers masters such as Agustín Lara, Armando Manzanero and Benny Moré.
“I have been encountering the bolero at different times in my life, and I am an admirer of the genre…But I had never tried to make a pure bolero and the time came to do it and with the greatest ones,” he says.
The new single was released along with a music video recorded at the historic Criteria Studios in Miami and directed by renowned photographer Omar Cruz, which intimately shows the interaction of the three artists during the process of creating Collection of Memories.
“From the beginning I wanted the video to be a documentary, because when you have a couple of teachers like Gilberto and Chucho, I think there is nothing more valuable than seeing them in action,” he says, also highlighting the good work of Cruz, whom he calls “one of the best photographers there is.”
Available now on digital platforms, the song constitutes the third preview of Fonseca’s next studio album, after ‘Si tu me Quiero’, which he recorded with Juan Luis Guerra and which won a Latin Grammy, and ‘Canto a la vida’.
“I’m finishing the album and we’re going to release it the first week of May. It is a very roots album, and I am not referring to Colombian roots,” he confesses about the production that will have two other special collaborations.