Original subtitles

Here we are in Central Park,

and this is as Latino as it gets

in my world, right?

Because I love Central Park,

I love New York,

you love New York, right?

I love New York.

There you go, so that's

what makes it us, you know?

Yeah, it's where every culture meets.

I think that's what

makes New York so magical,

is that you can find Un Chín

of everywhere in the world,

right here, you know?

Everywhere you look,

there's a little corner of the world

just there, I think it's beautiful.

So talk to me a little

bit about your project

that you're working on right now.

Yeah, I mean, my project

of life is creating music,

and that's the large umbrella,

and a lot of things

fall under that umbrella.

Right.

But my favorite moment of

creativity is the conception,

writing a song, either

by myself or at the studio

or with another artist.

And then I love to be

involved in all the steps after that.

So my Amori and my

music project is my life,

and I've just always grown up with music,

listened to music, paid close attention

to lyrics and the message.

So I'm a songwriter at heart.

I think that songs are a way of taking

pictures of a moment,

and I feel really privileged and alive

when I am doing that, writing songs.

So, yeah.

So just talk to me

about when did you start,

a little bit about your story,

so that our audience

knows who you are, yep?

Yeah, well, I grew up in Puerto Rico,

so my parents, -what part?

on the east of the island,

Juncos, Puerto Rico,

which is near the rainforest.

So I'm a mountain, suburbs girl at heart,

and yeah, I grew up listening to music

and that's in such a way,

and I think a lot of people

from Puerto Rico will say this,

there's no silence in Puerto Rico.

At night, you have

crickets and cookies and birds,

and during the day, you have loud music

coming from cars and businesses.

So I didn't know a

difference between music and myself.

I've just always been

in it and immersed in it

and always felt

called to sing and to play,

and from a very early age,

I really wanted to play the piano,

and I just became

obsessed with playing the piano.

So when my parents finally got me one,

being a YouTube kid, I just

would spend hours every day

A YouTube kid?

Just learning chords, learning songs,

trying to write my own, at

that time, really bad lyrics,

but I thought they were the best ever

because I was just

writing a song that I loved,

and it just never stopped.

So in a lot of ways, I'm

still that YouTube kid,

just making it up as it goes.

You look like a YouTube kid.

I hope that's the compliment.

That is a compliment,

you look like a kid.

You know, that's a good thing.

You still play.

I still play the same way.

I haven't lost this wonderment,

and I'm always awestruck when I can

finally play some songs

and learn that song that I love,

and it's been a slow

journey because I taught myself,

and I've just been

crafting and growing my art

just by myself, slowly and steadily,

but I honestly

wouldn't have it any other way

because it feels very intimate.

You should know I have eight siblings.

So I grew up in a loud

house, kind of like New York,

and music was my space.

It was my town on the piano.

This way, so you get out

of the street a little bit.

Keep saying, so music was your space?

It was, I didn't have to share music.

I shared a room, I shared a

school, I shared all my toys.

I didn't have any moments of solitude

with so many siblings,

and when I would sit on the piano,

it was just me in the silence,

and that feeling is

why I started doing it,

why I kept doing it,

and why I still do it

because especially now as I've gone older

and there's more stimulus coming our way

and life has changed

and we have a

supercomputer in our pocket,

there's not a lot of time to just exist

and just sit with yourself quietly,

and music does that.

Music does that for you.

Yeah, and I think for everyone too.

People who listen to it are

also taking the time to stop

and pay attention.

You could say it's meditative,

you could say it's therapeutic,

you could say it's just a pause,

but yeah, I think any time

you're listening to music,

engaging with music, you

are stopping for a second.

You're existing with yourself,

some emotional part of yourself,

some excited part of

yourself, sad part of yourself.

I think it depends, and

that's what makes it so beautiful.

What type of music do you listen to?

It depends a lot on where I wanna arrive.

If I wanna arrive somewhere

really excited and pumped,

I love listening to like,

(speaking in foreign language)

modern urban, talking

Caroli G, bad bunny,

I love some top 40 urban if

I'm trying to get all excited.

But in my core, when I'm by myself

and just trying to

make sense of the world,

I just love,

(speaking in foreign language)

the traditional song,

the traditional folk song,

storytelling, through a

song, capturing a moment,

capturing a feeling,

and inviting people in.

And I think if a song works

with just a guitar and voice,

it'll work, produced.

So I think it's the truest testament

of like the intimate feeling,

if a song can impact you

with just a voice and guitar.

Musicians inspire

visual artists all the time.

My studio is always like,

I'm gonna tell you one songwriter

that I think maybe you like, Roy Brown.

Mm-hmm, a classic.

To me, that song,

and I think we both know

what that song is, right?

Has always inspired so

many images in my mind

and when I sketch, right?

Does that do that when

you listen to other artists?

Do you, does it

inspire to create songs or?

Totally, I think

there's so much to be learned

from compositions that already exist

because in the way that

I approach songwriting,

you have, it's a two-part, right?

You have the melody

and you have the harmony.

The harmony is the base for the song,

the chord changes that you're making,

and then the melody is

kind of this floaty idea

that sits on top.

And the harmony part of it

all is very, it's very emotive.

It's like kind of, if you

make a change in a chord

from a major to a minor,

to like, put it simply,

but there's a million variations of that.

Those relationships of the

notes and the frequencies

that you choose to

support your melody over

can really like move people.

That's why if you listen to genres,

there's specific progressions that are

common in that genre

because the emotion is kind of similar.

You wanna feel either happy

or sad or, you know, nervous.

And so I love to take

inspiration and say,

okay, when I listen to

this song, how do I feel?

Especially at that bridge,

you know, in this bridge,

it's like this chord opens and I just

wanna like start running.

And I like take a

look at the progression.

And I love to like pull

inspiration and create, you know,

my own mosaic with

borrowed harmony, borrowed ideas

that through my lens become my own too,

because there's only

so many notes, you know?

And there's only so many chords.

So every variation of everything has

already been played,

but it's a combination

and the own experience

and then the melody added

to that and every artist,

especially if you're a vocalist,

you make your own

stylistic melody choices too.

And yeah, there's endless inspiration.

I'm sure this happens

for visual creatives too,

any sort of artist.

We're just like standing

on the shoulder of giants.

We've been doing this

for so long before us

that I almost feel

like an insatiable thirst

that I'm running out of time

because I will never be

able to listen to all the music

that I wanna listen to

and like learn everything

from everybody that inspires me.

Well, I can tell you what I want.

I would like to take a pause.

Yeah.

And we can stop somewhere.

And maybe you could

show us a little bit about

any feelings that you wanna show us.

Yeah, I'd love that.

All right, so we're gonna

be back in the whole chain.

Oh, never.

Thank you so much for having me.

Oh my God, thank you for having me.

Thank you for having me.

What was the name of the song?

"Presentimiento."

From the same name, right?

Yeah, the EP is also

called "Presentimiento."

You know, we were talking about our

bilingualism earlier

and something that is also very magical

is that there are

certain feelings and words

that don't translate.

So you have no choice but

to write it in one language.

And "Presentimiento" was that

because it's a word that

doesn't really exist in English.

You could say premonition

You could say pre-feeling

But you know, Spanish, presentimiento

something more than that.

It's like something that you know

before the information

has been given to you.

So that's what the song is about.

It's like Un Chín

Exactly, Un Chín