Feminine voices

The first is Mavis Sta­ples, Amer­i­can soul leg­end who turns 80 this year and who in her in­ter­view re­calls play­ing at many fes­ti­vals with a young Bob Dylan in the early six­ties. The last is Jorja Smith, a young woman from Wal­sall, an in­dus­trial city in the UK, who is ad­mired by Drake and Bruno Mars and in her chat talks about mix­tapes and In­sta­gram. Fifty-eight years sep­a­rate the two, in be­tween are 99 other in­ter­views with fe­male singers that jour­nal­ist Toni Cas­tar­nado – au­thor of other books with the same theme – has com­piled in the col­lec­tion Ellas can­tan, ellas hablan (They sing, they speak) (Silex). “I’ve al­ways been cap­ti­vated by fe­male voices,” the au­thor con­fesses. “In the 1990s I mu­si­cally fell in love with PJ Har­vey and Tori Amos, and I also began to get in­ter­ested in singers such as Lu­cinda Williams and Gillian Welch. The media out­let I was work­ing for com­mis­sioned me to re­view records by women or, if nec­es­sary, in­ter­view them, and with­out re­al­is­ing it I ended up spe­cial­is­ing in it.”

Ellas can­tan, ellas hablan, which al­ter­nates in­ter­views from the au­thor’s archive with con­ver­sa­tions con­ducted specif­i­cally for the pur­poses of the book, in­cludes en­coun­ters with such stars as Patti Smith, Mar­i­anne Faith­full, Rickie Lee Jones, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Es­trella Morente and Katie Melua, but also with a wide range of singers from this part of the world too, such as Maria del Mar Bonet, Joana Ser­rat, Sílvia Pérez Cruz, Maria Rodés, Maria Arnal, Rosalía, An­drea Motis and Nuria Gra­ham. “There were so many to choose from, es­pe­cially in Cat­alo­nia, where a very strong scene has emerged with all kinds of styles. We mustn’t let this era go un­no­ticed and en­sure that those to come in the fu­ture break out with the same force. The key, as Christina Rosenvinge says, is that girls lose their fear of pick­ing up a gui­tar.“

In the in­ter­views, ques­tions re­lated to music are found along­side those ad­dress­ing other as­pects of life. “I was sur­prised, for ex­am­ple, by the ma­tu­rity of An­drea Motis, who ad­mit­ted she didn’t know what a mil­len­nial was but had trav­elled around the world and met mu­si­cians of a very high stan­dard. I also loved lis­ten­ing to Nuria Gra­ham, when she ex­plained the ad­van­tages and dis­ad­van­tages of being a sin­gle child. And then Laura Mar­ling re­ally made me think when she said she couldn’t speak to a man about women’s is­sues.” The sense of such dif­fer­ent artists being grouped to­gether due to the mere fact of being women is also ad­dressed by some in the book. “Leonor Watling ques­tions why there must be cin­ema solely aimed at women and vice versa, as if she could not like The God­fa­ther.” And fem­i­nism is not left out ei­ther. “Some peo­ple be­lieve in the im­por­tance of the fa­mous quo­tas and some don’t. Some get in­volved in as­so­ci­a­tions and some don’t. Each of them has her own cir­cum­stances, but they all share the aim of fight­ing, im­prov­ing, chang­ing be­hav­iours. March 8 last year bal­anced things out in this re­spect. As Maria Arnal says in her in­ter­view, when Ana Rosa Quin­tana went on strike it was a pos­i­tive thing, since women with so much power are a ther­mome­ter for how far fem­i­nism works.”

Cas­tar­nado is cur­rently hold­ing a se­ries of con­ver­sa­tions with some of his in­ter­vie­wees in Barcelona book­shops. Tori Sparks and Cathy Claret have al­ready taken part, and other par­tic­i­pants will in­clude Sabina Witt, Edurne Vega, Sol Es­co­bar, Mar­i­ona Aupí, Marta Knight and Eva Fernández .

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