Aitana tells the story behind her song with Sebastián Yatra: “There has been a lot of judgment about why we are releasing a song together”

The song was released on Thursday afternoon with a touching video that shows them on a romantic trip but with a tone of nostalgia because it is perceived that this trip marks an end. The lyrics of the song highlight that desire to keep someone in your life even though they are moving away and begin with a phrase that can be interpreted in many ways: “It doesn’t matter if we’re wrong.”

A few hours before the release of the video clip on YouTube and other digital platforms, Aitana spoke with us via Zoom and told us the story behind this song that she considers one of the best of her career and that is already among the main musical trends. in Peru and other Latin American countries.

-Did you cry a lot writing this song?

Yes, my mother, I have cried the hardest. The thing is, to begin with, I must confess that I am a very crybaby. Currently, I am living in Los Angeles, composing and almost every day I make a song that brings a tear to my eye. And with “Akureyri” I did cry, I even posted a video on my Instagram in which I was crying, but that crying was really because I was finally making the recording of this song a reality.

-When did you record the song?

We started the song in Iceland, in June 2023, on a trip that Sebastián and I took, but we finished it in Mexico about six months later. It’s not a song that was made in a day, it was a whole process. In all that time it took us to make the song, we were in very different situations, because the situation when we started writing the song was very different emotionally than when we finished it. Once we recorded it, I was very nostalgic. It’s a song that I carry deep in my heart, with a lot of truth and I think it shows because when I play the video to anyone, whether someone who knows me or not, people cry. Right now, before the interview, I played a piece of the video to the girl who did my makeup and who doesn’t speak Spanish and she told me that it made her want to cry. I think that when you do something so truly, with nothing else behind it, it shows. Many people are talking about whether this is marketing. For me the best thing in the world would have been not having to involve emotional things here, just bringing up a topic and that’s it, but it’s something that came so naturally. It’s a song that we both made, but I was going to keep it. When we finished it, Sebastián liked it so much that he told me that he wanted it too and then we decided to do it together

– Did you both always have in mind to star in the music video?

The truth is, we recorded the song in January in Los Angeles and Félix Bollaín, the director of the video, was here. At that time, we became very friends and we had no plans to make the video clip with him. We showed him the song and the first thing he told us was: “We all have to go to Iceland! How are we going to make this video clip in another part of the world other than Iceland!” And he also told us that we had to go to Akureyri, because Sebastian and I did not get to go there on our trip. And the video shoot was great, imagine 4 days of filming with a whole team! Honestly, I would stay and live there.

-Did you have any special connection with Iceland?

Yes, I have it, because when I was 15 I went with my family to Iceland for two weeks on vacation. That was our first big family trip: we went by car, we slept in a different place every day, it was something that brought us together a lot. I remember that at that time I was in the stage of adolescence and I told them: I don’t want to go, I want to stay in my town with my friends, but it was very nice. And I feel very connected to Iceland, Akureyri is the first place I saw the Northern Lights with my family. There was a very big emotional implication and then going there with Sebastián… there were too many things, and that’s why we decided to go to Iceland to record the video clip because if some actors recorded it, it was going to be very fake.

– The phrase with which the song begins: “It doesn’t matter if we make mistakes”, was it born in the recording studio or when they were making the video?

That phrase seemed very metaphorical and very beautiful to me: it doesn’t matter if we make a mistake, because in the end there has been a lot of judgment about why we are releasing a song together, there is too much thinking behind that and we don’t wait to see what the result is, what’s behind it. , just enjoy it. So, it’s nice that “it doesn’t matter if we’re wrong”… but I have to tell you that it was born in a very natural way. We were in Mexico, in the car, finishing the song and Sebastián told me to record to have an audio to later record in the studio. So, I hit record and told him: ‘It doesn’t matter if we make a mistake.’ And then Mauricio (Rengifo) and Andrés (Torres), the producers of the song, took that part of the audio and included it.

-This is your third song with Sebastián Yatra. Do you feel like you have very similar visions of music and life perhaps?

I feel like we are very similar artists. We like to sing and do what we really feel. If you go to a club to dance and they play a song by Sebastián, you dance everything and have a great time. But if you then go to one of his concerts, you notice that the songs that people sing the most are his ballads. In that I admire him a lot, he can play all the genres regarding pop. In my case, I don’t want to stick to a single musical concept, I want to make pop, but all the pop in the world, because I love everything, and it’s a bit of what I’ve done throughout my career: I have many ballads, more danceable songs, a little more urban, a little more electronic, I’m changing a lot with that. And in that I feel that we are a lot alike and we also understand each other a lot when it comes to composing, which is something difficult to achieve. It is very difficult for me to enter a studio with someone I don’t know and compose, that costs me much more.

– I imagine that when composing you enter a space of vulnerability and with Sebastián you already have that trust…

With it, very nice things come out very quickly, really. It is much easier to compose when you have known someone for a long time, it happens to me with Andrés Torres and Mauricio Rengifo who have composed many of my songs, everything works much faster because we know each other. Sometimes it’s easier with someone you already know, but it’s also very important to meet new people, which is something I’m doing this year, because they also contribute to you in other ways, they make you realize things that you didn’t know or didn’t understand. in the studio and that is also important.

– Last year we had you for the first time in Peru…

It was incredible, first time in my life I went. And how delicious everything is for God! The first thing I did when I arrived was go eat. I landed around 9 or 10 at night and went to eat, I wanted to die, I didn’t want to leave, I wanted to eat everything.

– Browsing on (2023) and now Akureyri.” Now that you’ve visited us in Lima, when are we going to have a song with a Peruvian city?

I would love it very much, I think Camilo made a song for Machu Picchu, right? I would love it, what I would love most is to go back. I went for two days, I didn’t have time for more, it made me very angry because I would have liked to stay longer and go to Machu Picchu. Part of my team stayed to see Machu Picchu, but they arrived and it was all cloudy and they didn’t see it. They tell me that sometimes it can happen that you go up and it’s not a good day and you don’t see it, but I wouldn’t care, as long as I’m there I’m happy. I really want to go back, to be inspired and make a song for Peru, it would be something very nice.