This year has been one of complete creative renewal for me. I have been testing new tools that I was initially a bit afraid of, but I decided to keep an open mind to work with them and expand my vision. I have always considered myself an artist with multiple facets; as many of you already know, I enjoy writing, drawing, and, in some cases, sculpting.
One of the things I used to do frequently during my university years was writing poems—in fact, several of them ended up becoming part of my comic books. Since then, I always envisioned that one day they would turn into songs. It is incredible how far technology has come, to the point where today I can at least say I have the musicalized demos of those poems. This year has been loaded with many emotions in my personal life, and that inspired me to start writing introspectively again. It all began with a personal letter that ended up transforming into my very first song.
From that point on, I wanted to transform my old poems into music. It has been a process of countless hours of hard work; it is not about just pressing a button and creating something automatic. Finding the right voice, the melody, the composition, deciding which verses stay and which ones are rewritten, taking care of the meaning and the interpretation for the listener... there is a huge technical process behind it. That is how I managed to structure 15 songs. I started some of them in Spanish and others in English, but as a way to unify the project, I decided to fully adapt them into English. In my experience, English grants more freedom to be abstract, whereas Spanish is so rich in layers of emotions that it doesn't allow you to be vague; making something sound good in our language is a complex challenge. Because of this, the original tracks in Spanish were adapted and polished into their English version.
What is going to happen now with this project? Am I going to transition from being a comic book creator to a songwriter? No, not at all. This has been a beautiful hobby that has helped me channel many internal things; it is beautiful to transform certain emotions or stages of my life into a melody. I admit that I would love to formally record about 2 or 3 songs to release them as music videos on my YouTube channel, BUT right now my main focus remains on my comics.
I am currently working on a new comic book that will serve as the definitive conclusion to the Momentos de Caos (Moments of Chaos) saga. I am planning the launch of 'Disaster & Disorder' and organizing how I am going to promote my most recent physical material, 'Desastre & Desastroso'. For now, what I have been doing is sharing some short reels with teasers of my musical demos on my social media and my YouTube channel. It has been quite fun because I have even transmuted my emotions into different languages, achieving a few songs in Russian and Dutch. Although I don't speak those languages, to choose the winning version I spend hours listening over and over again to how the cadence drops, checking if the emotion matches the words. It is not perfect, they are digital demos, but they fit completely with the concept I have in mind.
Now I leave you with this amazing Art of James. Remember that you can also check out my illustrations on my Instagram (@historietasmanumias) and listen on
Enjoy it!
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