Why are we talking to you surrounded by hams?

This is my second home. The album is called “Everything that hurt me was beautiful”, and this is where I came to drown the sorrows of what had hurt me.

Let's go back to the beginning. How did your relationship with music begin?

I didn't have any musicians in my family, but my father used to buy those blues compilations, the kind you sell in a gas station, and I started to get hooked on the guitar. I had the spoiled kid thing where my parents gave me a guitar and some lessons, but I was just there wasting my teacher's time.

That's not when you got serious, then?

Back then, nothing serious. After that, I went to college, and I used the guitar more to try and pick someone up. It took getting to a life with more stability for me to start looking at the guitar more seriously. Having a relationship with someone who is a pianist also helped me to look more closely at composition. And that's also when I changed my way of thinking a little: instead of learning to play well and then making music, I started making music to start playing better.

That's also the immediacy that's in the blues...

Exactly. I immediately started adopting the attitude of the Texas sniper fallacy. First I shoot, and then I draw the target around the place where the shots hit. So, at this more stable stage of life where I'm paying bills, I started playing with some colleagues from work in jams where we played covers for ourselves. After that, I formed bands like Alina or Leo the Painter. In the context of those bands, there was always that magic of taking your ideas and transforming them, but there was always a feeling that that wasn't exactly where I wanted to go.

What they ended up playing wasn't what you had imagined.

Exactly. Sometimes it's even prettier, but that's not exactly where I wanted to take the idea. And starting a solo project at the same time as a band project was ideal, because I let go of everything I have inside in my solo work, and I go into the band project perfectly fulfilled, and free to see where the band wants to go. Now we're in the middle of winter, but creatively I feel like I'm in spring.

But looking at the name of the album, a winter had to happen before this spring.

The past year has been full of sad events. I'm a deeply romantic guy, and last year I had the end of a relationship that was very intense, like something out of a Mexican soap opera. And after that I had to learn to be single again, which is also sad today. But deep down, I'm still aware that all this sounds like a middle-class suburban hick being overly dramatic. No catastrophes have happened to me, just sad things.

And can you explain to us what fadogaze is?

That's a joke about the pedantry of no artist thinking there's a genre that defines them, and always having to create a new one. It's fado because it's me and a guitar singing sad things, and there's something shoegaze about it because, with the pedals, I try to evoke those Slowdive or Swans walls of sound.