Álvaro Lafuente grew up in Cuevas de Cañart, a small town in Spain with just 70 inhabitants. He was studying architecture. Then one day out of the blue, a Playstation microphone and social media taught him that the world was bigger than his eyes could perceive.
“First I was trying to do small concerts,” said Álvaro, who goes by the stage name Guitarricadelafuente. “Suddenly I saw myself doing a tour.”
Everything went very fast. When he least thought about it, Álvaro had already sold out a show in Madrid and others in several cities in his country in minutes. The furor began in 2017 covers that he uploaded to his social networks when he was a perfect stranger. The mixture of indie folk, rumba and flamenco in songs like “Guantanamera”, “Sixtinain”, “El Conticinio” and “Catalina”, made the world turn its eyes to the proposal of a boy barely 20 years old.
Five years later, Álvaro is ready to take on the world. Last week he was in Mexico, where he offered several concerts. He says the response was overwhelming. And this week he is in New York, the city he visits for the first time to promote his album “La Cantera”, the first of his career.
“Music has always been very present in my life and I have been passionate about it,” he said. “I was lucky that I named my passion as unconsciously […] giving all of me to make it happen”.
Now, the record takes pride of place on NPR Music’s list of 36 Favorite Albums of 2022. There he rubs shoulders with luminaries like Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar and the Mexican Silvana Estrada, with whom he incidentally recorded the song “Guantanamera”.
“[La música] it was not a possibility for me, you know?” Álvaro said in reference to how far he was from the world he is now familiar with, without a sponsor or someone to guide him on how to promote his music.
However, he believes that his musical vein is strong because he has been playing the guitar since he was 14 years old. And it was precisely in Cuevas de Cañart, where his grandmother lives, where he began to inquire about his passion.
“I started playing with friends, cousins,” he said. “And I learned about music twice, because my grandfather was a jota teacher in a town, and in the end, that musical spirit has accompanied me; I have all this part of tradition and folklore, but also where it was that I started listening to reggaeton and rock”.
And that is precisely what the artist seeks to represent in “La Cantera”, “a scene from my town, and that place where I met music”.
The cherry on the cake for his rising career is the Latin Grammy nomination he recently received in the category of Best Short Version Music Video for the song “A carta cabal”.
“For me it was like impossible to live from this,” he acknowledged. “I wrote and made songs because that’s what I liked, and having been able to make a career out of this I consider it a privilege.”