Getting Candid with Angélica Garcia
We’re getting candid in our interview with Angélica Garcia.
Angélica Garcia is a pop experimentalist who pulls from her Mexican and Salvadoran heritage to make art that speaks to the experience of growing up between cultures as a Hispanic-American. Her latest album Gemelo, meaning “twin” in English, represents the two selves, the spirit and body, and tackles how they work together and against one another.
We talk to Angélica Garcia about why she embraced singing in Spanish despite things getting lost in translation, the pain of grief that stays with you and how it can be a beautiful tool for transformation, and how she prioritizes your own happiness and personal growth, even if that means letting go of people and things that do not serve you.
Listen to the full interview with Angélica Garcia on Name 3 Songs podcast and find a transcribed excerpt below.
Name 3 Songs: You had a beautiful, beautiful album drop this year titled Gemelo. And looking back at your previous album, Cha Cha Palace in 2019, this era was filled with a lot of imagery that was really bright, bold, and playful. And it seems like you’ve slowly shifted into this new era with Gemelo that was more dark and moody and striking. What was your process in kind of finding your artistry between these two different eras?
Angélica Garcia: My main passion is storytelling when it comes to making music and writing lyrics. And so I kind of step up to the plate of whatever it is, and do my best. With Cha Cha Palace, I’m talking about growing up in the San Gabriel Valley, which is like a super Chicano part of LA, a lot of Mexican-American and Central American immigrants, Asian immigrants as well. So it was like a very textural, colorful place. With Gemelo, it’s kind of like a journey through the stages of grief. So obviously that’s gonna be more solemn. It’s gonna be more introspective. And I felt like that, that’s why the imagery took on that.
In the process of making this album, you talked about how it was important to listen to your intuition, rather than outside forces or physical anxiety, and to really connect with your inner self. Does this record almost feel more true to you in a way because you were trying to tap into your intuition?
I wouldn’t say words like “more true” necessarily, but I will say that it felt like more of a raw reflection. Grief is a very like isolating space. And I’m a very energetic and a kind of happy person and bopping around and I like to adventure and try things, but like grief is definitely not that at all. So it required a certain.. like taking off the mask. And the title itself, Gemelo means twin in Spanish. So it’s a reference to the fact that I believe that we as humans, have our body here, our flesh body in the physical world, but we also have like an intuitive self that is our twin. So we have two bodies, whether we acknowledge it or not.
No, I get what you’re saying. Personally, I feel like the past 15 years I’ve been snowballing through grief and picking up more and more of it as I get older. And it’s a comfortable thing and you can get used to it, but getting used to it is still painful. And so I’m just really curious about you feeling like you have those two selves like in writing this album and experiencing grief and putting that down on paper. Did you feel like you were accessing this other worldly version of you during that time and what was that like for you?
I think they’re related. I think that I was going through a really challenging, confusing time in my life, a lot of huge life changes at the same time. And I found that my physical body – I was so confused all the time. And it was really hard to navigate these changes because I just felt unwell in my body. And I felt like a lot of this songwriting process was almost when my flesh body was confused or anxious or like heart racing or like nervous thoughts, there was this quiet, whispering, wise body that was helping me through. And that’s what I call the intuitive spiritual self.
Had you felt able or needing to access that before or was this a new thing that you felt like, okay, I can access this power that I have because of the grief that I’m going through?
I didn’t know how to access it before and it wasn’t a lack of interest or anything like that. There’s this whole other side of life that kind of defies logic. And I think people do a disservice to themselves when they try to rationalize every single thing because our bodies are intelligent and do miraculous things every day beyond our comprehension.
And I think that the times in my life where I was suffering the most were when I was out of contact with that more intuitive self – which at this time of Gemelo, there were just so many things happening at the same time that that extreme environment created this… almost like separating an egg yolk from the egg. So that was kind of the first time that I was like, wait I have two cells because this one is almost like “beep beep like doesn’t compute” but I knew I was still in there and that I was able to hear after making that distinction from that extreme environment.
This is such a beautiful way of existing and thinking about things as an artist, someone who channels this into art in a form where other people can interact and engage with this. Because honestly, all of us have this within us but our society conditions us to turn that off and to not be in touch with it. And so to see how you’ve expressed it in like your art form is really beautiful.
Well, I think society as it exists today, right, benefits off of our confusion and us just operating off of what we’re programmed to do or whatever. So this is all extremely uncomfortable. Like, like I play “Y Grito.” Honestly, I was just touring Gemelo a little for like this past year. I probably played over 70 shows.
And then I realized sometimes looking out of the crowd, I was like, “yo, I’m so sorry. Like, y’all just came here with your drink. You were trying to have a good time. And I’m like, ‘the infernal stairs back at me!’ And I’m like, great. They’re like, girl, we’re just trying to enjoy our Saturday. I’m like, my bad. Sorry.”
This is what art is for. It’s for making people feel uncomfortable and thinking about things.
Well, yeah, right. And also I thought it was really cool to see so many, especially women come up to me after the show and acknowledge and be like, “hey, we just want to thank you for showing feminine rage.” And I was like sick. You know.
In talking of your live show – it feels like it’s an extension of the art, like you’re doing this performance art piece that when you have the context of the album, it makes sense in a whole different world. I know that you changed the live setup from being a full band to just you and a drummer. Was that part of the vision of being like, okay, this is a performance art piece, this is all connected into one big project?
Yeah, I mean, I’ve always been a fan of theatrics in general. I think some of my favorite vocalists, musicians, have always had this thing where they just embody this thing. And I realized for a long time that I was spending a lot of energy trying to… I don’t know… maybe this is just like some girl on the road musician type stuff – but for a long time, I was spending so much energy just trying to prove that I was a good musician. And then I finally just got to the point where I was like, you know, the girls that get it are just going to get it. And also, I am a good musician because I’m a trained singer and I put so many years into crafting that.
So that alone is its own thing. So I was like, well, I’d love to just showcase that. And another thing too is like, this Gemelo touches on a lot of different genres of Latino rhythm and music and some other pop and electronic and rock subcultures. But it never really confines itself to one genre. So I understand that it’s not like the most straightforward thing to dance to or whatever. So I was like, I should just show people how I would dance.
Listen to the full interview with Angélica Garcia on Name 3 Songs podcast available on your favorite podcast platforms.
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