Sometimes life rewards you with transformative experiences that represent a before and after in your existence, giving you experiences and lessons that change everything. Although these are voluntary and it is oneself who decides to jump headlong for them, it is never a dish of good taste to face the vicissitudes that a change of such magnitude entails. Move, settle, adapt. And when it seems that everything is fine and you have gotten the hang of this new routine, the bell rings and it is your turn to pack up and prepare for the inevitable return. Sounds simple, right? But no one comes back the same after something like this. A fight of mixed and adverse feelings that Enric Verdaguer manages to testify with excellent success in his first job as Henry’sthe alter ego of this Catalan artist who gives voice to a feeling as common as survival in contemporary exile.
“Somewhere, Sometimes” it is more than just a debut. It is an ode to what has been lived and to what has been avoided. A mosaic of raw and over-exposed feelings that tell us about the comings and goings of a protagonist who can be perfectly you, and all the stages that take place throughout an experience as close as the one narrated. Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that a trip of this nature begins marked by nostalgia, as seen in its opening cut “Wandering Nostalgia”, which between warm chords puts us in that deep position that marks the idealization of yesterday and those small details that were nothing before (or were even detestable) and are now wonderful and you would fervently wish they were part of your immediate reality. But these are gone, it is like that, and your current present, cold and denatured, is the one that you have to face with the best of attitudes. So here we go, just as it starts “Blue In Your Eyes” (the second passage of this journey, shared in double voice with Eliot Alma). Inevitably, and without you being aware, doubts will shake you from top to bottom and a series of multiverses will arise in your head generating different scenarios with respect to who you would have been if you had remained in the starting box and never had taken the step to change life (“Everything you stopped doing”). But torturing yourself with such hypotheses will not bring anything good, so even if it hurts, you will begin to appreciate the details of your new environment (“Down The Road“) and you will even decide to make all kinds of friends (“Friends Of All Kind”). But don’t be fooled, because even if you’re ashamed to admit it, you can’t help but feel like a fish out of a fishbowl and you will have your best and worst days, where even the festivities will feel incomplete due to that eternal feeling of permanent dislocation that invades you (“Inside & Out”).
The final climax so that such a heartfelt and well-rounded speech manages to touch us deep inside is provided by the artist from Igualada himself, showing off a regular but brilliant style that so soon drinks from Catalan minimal pop (“I love you so much”), as he refers us to Sufjan Stevens himself (“Colours In The Darkness”). A sum of factors and a round jewel that confirms that no experience is in vain, no matter how much it makes us have a hard time.
