Gepe has never been to Mazatlán —in the Mexican Pacific—, and El David Aguilar has never been to Coquimbo —in Chile—. However, the two singers agree that both cities have several similarities.
“Of course they are quite distant geographically,” Gepe said from his native Santiago, Chile. “But they have similar conditions.”
The pair of artists talked about each of these cities, and that is how they decided to write and record “Coquimbo, Mazatlán” together, a song that is part of “Realismo”, the new four-song EP by Gepe, whose real name is Daniel Alejandro Riveros Sepulveda.
These types of adventures or experiments by the Chilean singer and musician are not new in his career. What is new is the mixture that he made of Mexican music with his style that fuses Chilean folklore with electropop.
“That’s how we built the song,” he said. “So it ended up being a pretty entertaining alternative ranchera.”
One of those similarities is the landscape, he said, despite the fact that Coquimbo is more of a desert and temperate Mediterranean zone and Mazatlán is a port.
The aim was, then, to go beyond Gepe’s musical limits —if he ever had them—, because for this production he worked with producers and people with whom he had never worked, among them the Chilean Pablo Stipicic, precisely in “Coquimbo, Mazatlan”.
“These types of experiments serve to ‘let go’, to try new things,” he said. “In that attempt to try, it’s not as risky to try one song as it is to try ten [en un álbum completo]”.
This is the singer’s third EP since 2021, and it will be the prelude to an album for which he already has all the songs composed; he plans to release it in the first half of next year. It will also feature collaborations, something that has distinguished the artist’s work since its inception.
And the most important thing, which has him quite motivated, is the tour that he plans for 2023 and that will visit countries in Latin America and cities in the United States.