In a beautiful setting like Galdar In Gran Canaria, Van Gogh’s ear has become the most recent protagonist of the HBO series Acoustic Home which tries to understand everything that has happened in the Spanish music scene from the inside. Led by Miquel Corral, the group from San Sebastián offered a spectacular show and told all the details about the birth of the group, how it started and also the traumatic moment that the group lived with the departure of Amaia Montero.
Leire, Haritz, Alvaro, Paul and Xabi They cross different very Canarian settings of the beautiful island to remember everything that happened during their almost 3 decades which had ups, downs, changes, friendships, crises… Well sure, the most relevant thing was the change of singer in 2007.
“It was very hard news, the worst we’ve had. Someone as talented and charismatic as Amaia… I don’t want to say that a pianist or a bass player was easier to correct. C was a hard blow. We tried not to do that, but the 4 of us stayed with lots of songs to write, we had lived it all, won prizes that we can’t even say, sold I don’t know how many records but we wanted to continue So we started creating a record without knowing who was going to sing it” explain the members of the group during the interview.
However, those from San Sebastián were clear that they wanted to move on: “The songs started coming out and it was Van Gogh’s La Oreja. Which led us to come together as a band there. 10 years ago and enjoying the lost a bit.” A little. The feeling was that we were dying of success. Then the thing with Amaia comes and it seems that we have recovered it by writing this disc with Leire, in a more direct, emotional and thoughtless way. It was genuine. These are things that you have no control over but that gave us those feelings back.”
Leire’s justification of Van Gogh’s The Ear
Then HBO’s Acoustic Home launches the big question through its host Miquel Corral: “We were looking for someone amateur who had experienced music like us. And with Leire it stuck. There was a big part of the bet because we didn’t know each other.” We had spent an afternoon with her and we had to share life with her. But it was very natural: we thought it was over. The first tour had this morbidity because everyone came to see the news”.
After explaining the criteria they had to bet on Leire, Pablo Benegas, Alvaro Sources, Xabi San Martin and Haritz Garde assures that it was a risky decision: “Another key is the naturalness with which she enters a thankless role in the sense that she never wanted to let go. She wanted to have the opportunity to enjoy the moment, the music, her passion very naturally. It helped people understand that they had the right to experience Van Gogh’s La Oreja.”
And after the risk came the palm because the four male components claimed, as they did from the first minute, the figure of Leire: “She has a terrible merit because Leire did it by not coming to take the place of anyone but by creating his place, in silence, without making noise, without ever entering into confrontation, building his own character in La Oreja by Van Gogh. That was the great job: the discretion, the modesty to find your place and your identity in the songs”.
In this sense, Leire confirms what he felt when he joined one of the biggest groups in the Spanish music scene: “I remember that when they called me and told me that they were looking for a singer, everyone knew they had separated. And I thought it was enough to have the experience of being a singer of La Oreja by Van Gogh. It was a very natural process” .