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From album
Honestidad brutal
Andrés Calamaro · 1999 · Track 18
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The story behind
The first time I heard Con abuelo, I was hooked by that piano that sounds like a whisper between the chords. It's not a song that hits you right away, but rather one that gradually draws you in with details that appear and disappear, as if the grandfather in the title were telling stories in a low voice. The track lasts five minutes and twenty-nine seconds, enough time for the melody to unfold at its own pace, with room for the bandoneon —an instrument Calamaro learned as a child— to lend that nostalgic air that runs through the entire piece. It's not common to hear a piano so present in Argentine rock, let alone with that blend of melancholy and tenderness that makes it sound personal, almost intimate.
Calamaro arrived in Uruguay as a teenager and there recorded his first album as a keyboardist in the band Raíces, a group that opened the doors to the local scene for him. Earlier, at the age of eight, he had already received his first bandoneon, and at thirteen he picked up the electric guitar and piano, the latter under the tutelage of Osvaldo Calo. Over time, he tried his hand at various lineups, from a blues band called Chorizo Colorado Blues Band —which he formed with his friend Augusto Gringui Herrera— to projects that blended rock with influences from The Platters. But it was with Elmer's Band, alongside Gringui and Eduardo Cano, where he began to define his sound. Later, Héctor Zeta Bosio invited him to join The Morgan, a group that included Gustavo Cerati and where Charly Amato and Sandra Baylac also played. That lineup evolved into Stress, the seed of what would later become Los Estereotipos, and then into Proyecto Erekto when Cerati joined. Con abuelo sounds like that crossroads, like someone who has spent years navigating between genres and styles without losing sight of what matters: music as a dialogue between the past and the present.