Álvaro Rivas from Alcalá Norte, who will release a single on March 5, ‘El hombre planeta’, the first preview of a second album that will be released in September, has given an interesting interview to El País where he talks frankly about his family, especially about his two journalist parents. Rivas’s mother, Sara García Calle, was an editor for El País and died at the age of 27 after her son was born, due to a pulmonary embolism. Álvaro says that the circumstance left his father far from living ‘The Canyon Life’, since he was left “widowed, unemployed and with me as a newborn.”
This leads him to kindly put the focus on the medium itself. When El País tells Álvaro that the editorial office was devastated by the death of his mother, the artist points out that that death also had an economic impact on his father: “As my mother was what would be falsely self-employed today, they could have recognized a certain employment relationship, but they didn’t,” he says. «To my old man, who just became unemployed, with a newborn child and a widower, a little help would have been nice for my orphanhood. But hey, here you and I are, chatting.
Rivas, previously, indicates: “As for journalists and my mother, I have to say that the ones who behaved best were the Luca de Tena, who gave me little gifts and things like that as a press orphan that I was.”
Luz Sánchez-Mellado, the El País journalist who interviews Rivas, has said in
His father mortgaged an apartment that he now rents to Álvaro, who has been married since he was 25 to a Brazilian woman, and the singer considers himself “privileged” to have this safety net, although he recognizes that his case is unusual because, in addition, he can make a living from music: “At 30, I make a living, and very well, from writing songs. I tell people that I smoke joints, and everyone doesn’t care,” he says. «So, naturally I live better than him. But mine is an abnormality. When I look at my colleagues and their elders, both the bourgeois and the neighborhood ones, their life is not like mine.
Álvaro diagnoses a bigger problem, which is housing: “Surely my father saw it as a gigantic mess to have a 20-year mortgage with a very high interest rate that he had to pay alone,” he tells Sánchez-Mellado. «Now, that seems like a privilege. The inaccessibility of housing has changed everything.
