In the process of making his third and fourth records, La Onda de Juan Pablo and Introducing Juan Pablo, singer-songwriter Juan Wauters pondered his creative and cultural identity. He also weighed the impact that releasing music in Spanish, his first language, could have on his career — and his ability to connect with a global audience.
“Playing for people who are like me helps me understand who I am,” Wauters tells the Scene via phone. He’s just returned from a South American tour that included a stop in his hometown of Montevideo, Uruguay. Wauters immigrated to the New York borough of Queens with his family in 2002, when he was a teenager, and he considers New York his home now.
But playing in the town where he spent the early part of his youth — which he did for the first time in 2017 — requires absolute transparency. “It’s like playing to your parents, but a whole crowd of them,” he says. “There’s no faking, no fronting.”
That radical transparency is something Wauters values deeply, but doesn’t always get to channel when he plays in the U.S. In the States, crowds change with every show, and it’s rare to see many people he knows in the audience. (His current tour brings him to East Nashville DIY venue Soft Junk on Monday.) This allows him the freedom to perform as a different character each night. In Montevideo, however, he faces people who have known him since he was a child, which has had a grounding and transformative effect on him.
Wauters came onto New York’s DIY scene in 2008 as the lead singer of punk-rock group The Beets. The band achieved critical success, opened for Pavement and released records via respected indie labels like Seattle’s Hardly Art and Brooklyn’s Captured Tracks. In 2014, Wauters released his first solo LP, the light-hearted and lo-fi N.A.P.: North American Poetry, also via Captured Tracks. A second album, Who Me?, followed in 2015, and he started to amass a small but dedicated following.
On the surface, Wauters seemed to be doing well. He was constantly touring the U.S. and Europe. But he harbored the fear that the gap between his musical persona and his true self was growing too large, and that his act was too contrived. The real Juan Wauters wanted to make music that spoke to people in all walks of life. But his first two records seemed to position him as a niche lo-fi artist — his name could become a brand, easily marketable to fans of, say, Mac DeMarco. That wasn’t something he wanted, especially considering all the other powerful things it means to make music under his own name.
“I have no alias,” says Wauters. “I make music as myself, which means I’m carrying on my tradition, my legacy, my parents’ name and my neighborhood.”
After realizing his responsibility to himself and his community to make music that genuinely reflects his worldview, he decided to make a change. It began with his name. In Uruguay, people referred to Wauters by his first and middle name: Juan Pablo. But when he moved Stateside, he was just Juan. Reclaiming the name Juan Pablo symbolized the resuscitation of his identity as an immigrant and Spanish speaker.
In 2016, Wauters decided to make an album introducing this revitalized version of himself, and wanted to release it under the name Juan Pablo. He recorded the songs, but the label wouldn’t let him release it under his new name. Wauters knew inside that he was moving in the right direction, so rather than let the pushback inhibit him, he decided to dig deeper into his roots and make his first album with lyrics entirely in Spanish.
In 2017, he packed two suitcases with all the recording gear needed to make an album and hopped a flight to Buenos Aires, Argentina. The goal of the trip was to record songs in Spanish with musicians he met during his travels. People told him he was crazy for setting out on a trip with no concrete plan, but to Wauters, it was the gateway to further creative and personal growth. His six-month expedition took him to Peru, Chile, Argentina, Mexico City, Uruguay and Puerto Rico.
“I spent a month in each country,” Wauters says. “I’d go out in the day and night looking for musicians. I especially wanted instruments on the songs that could only be found in those countries.”
He approached musicians in the street or in bars, which made the recording experience an organic process. Sometimes he’d call on friends to ask, for example, if they knew someone who plays the accordion in Mexico City. (Wauters provides a detailed travel journal on his website, in which he explains the backstory of each collaboration.) In the end, Wauters estimates that 40 people were featured on the record. The result of these collaborations was the La Onda de Juan Pablo — as translated by Wauters, “Juan Pablo’s Vibe.”
La Onda de Juan Pablo and Introducing Juan Pablo were finally released earlier this year. And while they were both released under the name Juan Wauters, they do feel like a departure from the earlier iteration of Wauters and his music. Both records are collections of lovely, unique folk tunes that portray simple vignettes of everyday life and universal feelings. The softer, friendlier sounds on these records are more accessible — stuff you’d want to play your mom or boss, regardless of whether they spoke Spanish.
Wauters seems satisfied with his new direction, and the reward of connecting with his intercontinental audience. But to him, the hard work of translating his true expression will never be over as long as he keeps working.
“It’s a battle to stay genuine,” he says. “It’s a forever experiment.”
