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Luis: Actually Violet was inspired by Dream Theater because their albums are stories and we’ve always wanted to do that. Violet is a concept album.
Luis: Well, Violet is a love a story, it’s about a guy that’s not really mentioned…
Alonso: The whole story is taken from the guy’s perspective.
Luis: He meets a girl in a bar and it’s about meeting her and nothing bad is going to happen. It’s about having the courage to do it. So they meet in the first song, ‘So Fine’ and then they start having feelings in the second song, which is ‘Found Love.’ Wow, this girl is amazing. She makes me feel amazing and something new.
Paul: He says that a lot, [starts singing to the melody of Found Love] “love loooove love.” It’s the thrill of love and wanting to shout it out.
Alonso: The third song, ‘You and your Heart’, is about them in bed, probably after making sweet love [sings the melody of found sweet love]…We have to picture almost every song because we are telling a story like we are making a video. So for example, if we have to picture the third song, ‘You and your Heart’, it’s in the morning and everything is so white and clean.
Luis: And in the story, the man doesn’t want to wake up the girl.
Alonso: I wrote that song for my wife. She was sleeping and I didn’t want to wake her, so I wrote it really slow and soft.
Luis: The 4th song is “All my Demons”, which starts to bring the personality of the character out.
Alonso: It exposes his insecurity. So he’s loving this girl but he is afraid and feels so small. In the 5th song, she leaves, most likely from his insecurities causing destructive behavior, which is why it’s called ‘Gone’.
The 6th song is about being alone. It’s called “You are not alone”, but he feels alone. He is alone and in the corner of his room…
Luis: Completely depressed.
Alonso: That’s right and you’ll notice our album tries to follow a natural flow of a relationship. So the 7th song, Move Along, is the time after you spent a lot of time in your dark room, and you decide, this is the day, I’m going to finally take a shower.
Luis: Call your friends, “We’re going out!”
Alonso: Yeah I’m gonna get up and walk this road man! It’s my favorite song on the record. So it’s about getting up and moving along. It’s called “Move Along” actually. So when you have this feeling of going on and you decide to put on pants for the first time in two weeks. That time when your mind is confused and you talk to a friend. You decide, “I should go and talk to her. She wants me to talk to her.”
So I will go, and recite a poem and shout at her. That’s the “I WANT YOU TO KNOW” chorus of the 8th song. You know, he sings to a balcony and he’s supposed to be there.
Luis: We kept thinking in our minds while making this album, how is it going to sound? Like if you’re talking to a girl on the balcony, it’s going to sound like a parade. So we tried to do that.
Alonso: You’d probably hire a couple guys to make sure she hears you. So that’s what happens…we don’t want to get into details to keep it open to interpretation.
Luis: We all have our own interpretation.
Alonso: The next is called, “GO GO GO” and it’s quite strange. It’s about talking to your conscience and talking to the devil. That’s why there are no instruments. The original folk comes with a body and this doesn’t. It’s just primal emotion.
For me, that time something is going to happen. Like an intense conversation or an eruption. The drums are symbols of the rumbling. And what happens is there is a car crash and she dies.
The next song is “Fading”. It starts [singing] “All my world is upside down and you’re on the ground…”
Luis: Which is pretty ironic because in “GO GO GO” his demons say “You’re free, I’m not going to haunt you anymore.” But in the next song [clicks fingers] it’s gone. And he never got to enjoy being free with the girl.
Alonso: Originally, in the album, we wanted to end with a parade and being happy, but the album doesn’t end happily.
Luis: When we made this we thought we would have to play it in order.
Alonso: We’ve never played it in order…
Luis: The energy of the album doesn’t end strong. So we have to play with the dynamics of the album.
Alonso: Yeah so we decided to end the story nicely. So the story ends with throwing ashes in the river and paying tribute.
Paul: It’s a hopeful song.
Luis: We named the album Violet because we wanted to pay tribute to the character we never mentioned in the story. At that point time, Alonso had a close family member pass away. Her name was Violetta in Spanish, Violet in English, so we decided to pay tribute to her.
Alonso: It’s never the same thing that happened to you, but you use your experiences.
Luis: Our producer, at one point, was so sad…
Alonso: I was starting a relationship and he was finishing a very hard difficult one
Luis: Its funny, Alonso was in the ‘Found Love’ part of a relationship. Paul and I were in the ‘Move Along’ phase, having fun and partying and our producer David was in the “You’re not Alone” phase.
Alonso: We all contribute to the story and lyrics are just a small part of the whole story. So what we do is I start singing and writing without guidelines. I sing anything it doesn’t make any sense.
Paul: He has the ability to create melodies without saying any words.
Alonso: Then we go with a draft that doesn’t mean anything but has the basic outline. Then we talk about the story and start sketching it using the length of the words I used.
Alonso: Yes exactly. We probably did more than 100 melodies and ideas but we recorded 38 songs. Every song was a very long process.
Luis: We spent like 3 years making this album.
Alonso: Yeah and on this second album. We have probably done 6 six songs right away. But we’ve only concentrated on that.
Alonso: Not exactly. We made like 5 chapters. We would write songs for the chapters. The first chapter would be meeting the girl, in a different chapter he would go out and explore the world.
Luis: That’s a great question. No one has asked that. There is… one thing. But there is a song called something like, “Chronicles of all… Dies of love”
Alonso: Yeah [sings] “Until we meet again”… So the guy is supposed to commit suicide but we thought it was too Shakespearean.
Luis: We thought about doing a dark ending, but we decided to keep it more positive.
Luis: So we had no egos but just the sound in mind. So I think that was a very important thing while doing the songs. And I think live we actually transmit a stronger ‘Lion’ than on the album.
Alonso: And we don’t have instruments on the album that’s not in the live performance.
Luis: What you hear is what you get. It was quite a challenge in the beginning because we have a lot of vocals on the album and you have to double the vocals, sometimes triple.
Paul: Thank god it’s not just the three of us live, we have 6 people when we play live, and we all sing. And we are able to reproduce all the vocals like the album.
Alonso: So the second album will be very vocal. Because in the beginning we were three, so it sounded small but now we have 6 so we can do more. We have a female percussionist and she adds a new color to that.
Alonso: We had Beatles and Queen and Cat Stevens in our mind. Spanish has a different set of phonetics that are very pointy. Whereas English is very round. The shape really matters when you say the words. For me, it was a no-brainer.
Paul: It’s all nice for us that we sing in English because a lot of teachers in other cities in Peru tell us that they use our music to teach English.
Alonso: Singing and movies really helped me. I know all the movies of Jim Carrey.
Alonso: Next time.
Track List