Jorge Drexler is the rare artist whose biography is not backstory but method. Born in Montevideo under a civic-military dictatorship hostile to musicians and liberal intellectuals, he spent his twenties as a moonlighting doctor — guitar under the white coat by day, white coat in the guitar case by night — paying for early recordings with clinical earnings while colleagues on both sides dismissed him as a hobbyist or a weirdo with an earring. The dictatorship ended. The stiffness in his joints did not. It took until he was 45, and an album called Bailar en la Cueva (Dancing in the Cave), to shake out what the regime had deposited in his body. The scientific training did not leave either, and eventually he stopped fighting it. The breakthrough came when he stopped treating science and poetry as competing impulses and let them fuse. Todo Se Transforma, built on Lavoisier's Law of the Conservation of Mass, was his first genuine hit. After that came songs about the prehistory of human migration (Movimiento) and the cellular origins of love (El Plan Maestro). Multiple Latin Grammys followed. The formula — cosmic and biological scope, deeply personal emotional register — turned out to be the thing the cantautor tradition could not give him and that he had to build himself. El Otro Lado del Rio, written for The Motorcycle Diaries, won the 2005 Oscar for Best Original Song. Drexler was not invited to perform at the ceremony — he was still largely unknown — so he delivered a short a cappella version in lieu of his acceptance speech. It is one of the more elegant acts of defiance in recent awards history, and it set a template for how he operates: the gesture lands harder for being quiet. The new album Taracá returns to the candombe sound of his Uruguayan homeland, partly in response to his father's recent death. His father escaped Nazi Germany as a child; Drexler describes it as a life with a horrible start and a beautiful ending. The record spans 74-year-old classical guitarist Julio Cobelli to Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko, and it has collected eight Latin Grammy nominations ahead of the November ceremony. The range is not eclecticism for its own sake — it maps Drexler's actual range of reference, which runs from Spinoza to Homer to Italo Calvino's Medusa-as-fame metaphor. He has been thinking seriously about the structural problems of Spanish as a songwriting language. He helped Shakira translate some of her songs and came away with a renewed appreciation for English monosyllables. Can't Buy Me Love, he notes, sits a lot more neatly in a melody than No Puedes Comprarme el Amor. His solution has been to work with the grain of Spanish rather than against it — longer lines, denser imagery, the sentence as the unit rather than the word. It is a genuinely different compositional approach, not just Spanish with an accent. He keeps his prizes in a closed cabinet and tries never to open it. The word for success in Spanish, éxito, derives from the Latin exitus — the way out, the code for death in medical practice. To Drexler, success means the end of the process, and he is not ready for the way out. That is not false modesty. It is a man who spent his thirties building a method from scratch, his forties learning to dance, and his sixties making the album that finally sounds like where he is from.
