Debi Nova Addresses ‘Very Traumatic Moment’ on New Album, ‘Todo Puede Convertirse en Canción’

“Brindo” is a song I wrote about something that happened to me 20 years ago. Twenty years ago, I was in a violent relationship, and it’s incredibly difficult for me to talk about it. Over the years, I’ve had to work on it a lot — and I think I’ll continue working on it — but I always felt I had this unresolved task of writing a song about it. I remember when I first heard Rozalén’s song “La Puerta Violeta,” which talks about violence, and I thought, “Wow! If I can ever write a song about what happened to me, I think it will do me a lot of good. And it will do us all a lot of good, because it’s something that happens to many of us.” So, I gave myself that task, and honestly, it wasn’t easy. It’s a song that felt very uncomfortable to write. In fact, many times I thought about abandoning it, but I told myself, “No, I have to finish this song.”

The song was born from the piano. I sat down to write it, and the chords immediately told me, “This is the song.” I thought about writing it from a place of celebration, which is why it’s called “Brindo” (“I Toast”), because even though it was something very painful for me, I feel very proud of what I’ve been able to do with it in my life, and I think that’s a reason to raise a toast. So, it has that element that isn’t what you might expect from a song that talks about this topic, but for me, it was important to focus on strength rather than the tragedy of the subject. And I think that’s the root of why this album exists.

The song also features a choir I recorded with six young women from the Destiny Project foundation in Costa Rica, which supports the social reintegration of victims of abuse and trafficking. I went there one afternoon and recorded the six young women for the “oohs” in the song. It was a very powerful, very symbolic moment. I wanted to talk not just about how we grow stronger after something like this, but also to truly have the experience of surrounding myself with women who have gone through similar things and singing together. It was very healing, very beautiful.

“Holograma” is that feeling of being trapped, of the prisons we create for ourselves. And beyond a relationship, I think I channeled all those times in my life when I’ve felt like I keep going back to the same place where I’ve been hurt, and I ask myself why. Why do we repeat the same story? Why do I do this to myself? Why do I keep idealizing a situation that has already shown me it’s not the right one for me? It was the only song in the studio that made me cry while I was singing it. In fact, I had to stop recording because I was crying out of frustration, seeing myself in that same place thinking, “Wow! I can’t believe my heart keeps getting broken right there.”

Obviously, I have a very clear moment in my mind of how I wrote the song — I don’t feel ready to talk about that. But I do think it’s a very common situation we experience as human beings, when we don’t understand why the same thing keeps happening to us over and over again, because we idealize something that has clearly already shown us it’s not meant for us, and yet we keep going back, searching for something. That is the metaphor — being in love with a hologram, embracing a hologram, which in the end is nonexistent. And that, I’d say, was the song that gave us the most trouble in the studio, because I couldn’t decide. At first, we added everything — drums, strings, a huge outro with electric guitars — and later I realized that this song needed the opposite. It ended up being just my piano as the backbone of the song, with strings in one section and a small drum loop. That was it. In the end, I’m very happy with the result, but it’s a song that makes me uncomfortable.

I think “20/20” is like the syrup, the cure. It was a song that was born in the moment. We got together to write in the studio with Ana Sof (Ana Sofía Castañeda Altamirano), who is a great Mexican songwriter, and Julián Bernal, who is the co-producer of four songs on the album. I think there was a need to get out a bit from the hole, the black pit I was in. Juli and I had started with the chords, which are different chords, so we were struggling a lot to find the melody that worked with them. And Ana Sof started singing: “Agua helada en mi piel, pelo suelto, todo bien” (“Frozen water on my skin, hair loose, all is well”). And I said: “That’s it!” Like, I need to shake it off, I need to let my hair down, I need to go out for a walk and sing with my headphones on and people to listen, I don’t care.

From there, we started writing the song, and that line, “Tengo 20/20 de visión porque todo puede convertirse en canción” (“I have 20/20 vision because everything can turn into a song”), was exactly how I’ve felt throughout this album: that writing songs gives me that clarity and vision to understand my emotions. For me, that is the most beautiful ability we humans have — to transform difficulties into beauty, what weighs us down into a work of art or a poem or a text. That phrase, for me, encapsulates the concept of this album.

Fun fact: I wrote “Perdidx en la Ciudad” (“Lost in the City”) last October, when I went to Billboard Latin Music Week in Miami. That panel was wonderful, and it was part of a series of very exciting, amazing moments for me — but at the same time, I felt completely burnt out from the previous album. It was the first time I was promoting an album while being a mom, so my energy levels weren’t the same as before, and I really felt divided, with a lot of mixed emotions. Because even though you’re doing what fulfills you, what makes you feel good, you’re far from home, so you feel guilty about that, and you feel a little lost. That’s kind of where the process of “Perdidx en la Ciudad” started.

That afternoon, I met with Jaze in the studio. He was in Miami, and I had listened to his music, which I loved, and I got a phone call: “Jaze is in the studio. Do you want to stop by and work with him?” And he was in a similar place — at a different point in his life, of course — but we started talking about it. About how crazy it is that sometimes you’re living your dream, you’re doing exactly what you always imagined you’d do, but you feel like a machine, like you’re just going from one thing to the next with this never-ending to-do list. But then, when you give yourself the space to feel and think, you say: “Oh my God, I don’t know if I’m in the place where I want to be. I feel like maybe I’m far from home, far from what feels right in my heart.” And that’s what “Perdidx en la Ciudad” is about. It’s like we need an activity, something to fill our hearts, but at the same time, we need to give ourselves space. I don’t know what the perfect balance is, but I think this song is an attempt at finding that balance.

“Aurora” is that realization that the essential things in life are here, around us, within our reach. However, I believe we have to go through the “Brindos” and the “Hologramas,” and we have to go through the mud and that ritual of catharsis in order to reach the realization that the aurora, let’s say, the colorful sky, is here. It’s a state of mind. It could be the most beautiful sky, but if we’re drowning in our emotions, it’s very hard for us to see it. So I think “Aurora” is like the end of the journey, like going through the mud to bloom.

In life, I don’t need much more than “a bit of singing, a bit of dancing, and a lot of living life because it slips away,” [as the lyrics say]. That is, music, the people I love — that’s what I need in my life. Alexandre Carlo, [lead singer of the Brazilian reggae band Natiruts], was in charge of translating [his verses] into Portuguese. The song already has a somewhat Brazilian nature to it. We had already collaborated on the previous Natiruts album (“Que Bom Você de Volta II”), so I wrote to Alexandre, and he joined the song. It’s one of my favorites on the album.