No one who has ever heard a record of Leon Benavente, or has attended one of the band’s concerts may deny the undeniable charisma of its vocalist, as well as the magnetism of his voice and the quality of the lyrics of his songs. So why not do something with all of it, in between gigs? Well, that is what the good old David Cobas, better known as Abraham Bob in the world of music, who has decided to take his collection of poems for a walk “This is not a song”published in 2021 and which, now that I think about it, is not a collection of poems to use, but rather a set of intimate reflections by the Galician musician.
framed within the Festival White Letter, now a fixed date for lovers of literature in Bilbao, Abraham Boba’s recital brought a multitude of curious men and women, as well as regular fans of León Benavente, who, with great intrigue, occupied the seats in the Auditorium of La Alhóndiga Bilbao to enjoy the show. An audiovisual montage, in which Abraham Boba reviews different passages from “This is not a song”a book that, as I said at the beginning, has more of a vital logbook, or a diary, than a collection of poems, and in which he reflects his particular vision of life and of “a crazy world“, as Moris would say, which goes “[…] from silence to Artificial Intelligence […]”.
Elegant as always, and demonstrating absolute control of diction and voice, the musician chewed and savored each word, relying on the projections of the Galician filmmaker Lois Patiño, as well as on the pre-recorded bases that accompanied the declamation of, on this occasion , bard from Vigo. Perfectly handling the changes of rhythm necessary for a show of this type, Abraham knew how to immerse us fully in his world, making us feel part of what he was telling, and interspersing it with three songs masterfully performed on the piano: a song with a 50’s air s, another inspired by the documentary by German filmmaker Werner Herzog, ‘La Soufrière: waiting for an inevitable disaster’, and a version of ‘Mr. Lonely’ by Bobby Vinton, all of them perfectly framed within the discourse.
The themes were moving between the intimacy of “the stunned individual”, the social with “new types of war” and the “truth as the opposite of democracy”, nostalgia – or how to “look in the past for a way to face the future ”- and loneliness, because as he reminded us in one of the recited texts, it is “more difficult to understand loneliness than to assume it”.
Dancing to the sound of his own words, the artist took us with him on a unique journey in which, finally, we were able to make sense of that book that we had carefully placed on the music bookshelf two years ago, where we had put him up after that first poor reading. But now yes, now it is easier to understand everything that Abraham Boba (…or David Cobas, who knows?) wanted to tell us when he decided to address, surely as a self-help, everything that he could not or did not want to turn into a song, because the mission of these texts was another.
So, now that we almost understand them, it’s time to review these “non-poems”, even knowing that we will never enjoy them as much as we did during these 50 magical minutes, in which Abraham Boba taught us to feel another way, and to enjoy the beauty of some words that, in his case, and as we already knew from the lyrics of his songs, always have a reason.
