Labels were not made for Mari Trini. Or rather, she was the one who did not fit into any category, especially those related to art. Her fierce individualism led her to be herself above all, and that always comes at a high price. Musically, her work falls squarely into the realm of author songs, but when we talk about Spanish author songs, we hardly see her name appear.
Due to the sonic turn he took in the late seventies, he is also often associated with melodic music, even though his lyrics are above the usual romantic conventions of the genre. “A while ago I was talking with Rozalén and we said that, in hindsight, there is no singer-songwriter comparable to Serrat or Sabina,” says Esther Zecco, singer-songwriter and now also author of the book Mari Trini, portrait of a free woman (Efe Eme). “With my book, what I wanted was to start naming Mari Trini as a singer-songwriter. She described herself that way and I see her that way.
There was practically no information about María Trinidad Pérez de Miravete Mille, born in Murcia in 1947 and who died in 2009. This is because the artist that this woman became never spoke about her private life. Until now, to get to know Mari Trini, you had to go through newspaper archives, surf Google and search for old interviews on YouTube. This curiosity to know more, to learn more about an artist whose music he admired, is what led Zecco to write his book.
They spent four years gathering documentation and interviewing people close to the singer and composer: musicians, friends, journalists. The public appreciated the initiative. Zecco’s book is now in its second edition. Another biography will be published in October, I’m not who you thought I was (Plaza & Janés), signed by journalist Miguel Fernández, which will coincide with the release of a retrospective album of the same name in November. This year marks the 15th anniversary of his death from cancer.
“I was very attracted to him,” Zecco explains about why he decided to take up the challenge posed by journalist Arancha Moreno, director of the music news website Efe Eme, which published his book. “When I investigated, I saw that he had a huge musical legacy, about twenty albums, many singles that were number one and more than 300 songs that, in addition, are very good. They have poetry, a message, and they are daring. And yet, all this seemed to exist in a kind of blur.”
Being a woman and singing author songs in Spain in the early sixties was not easy, but that did not stop María Trinidad from starting the journey that would transform her into Mari Trini. From the beginning, she felt that it was going to be rare, but that did not discourage her. And he was lucky. The first to realize that he had a gift was the filmmaker Nicholas Ray, who at that time lived in Madrid, where he ran the Nicca nightclub. After seeing her perform, he suggested that she take care of her career. The professional relationship with the director of Rebel without a cause It didn’t last long, but it helped Mari Trini escape stifling Spain in 1963.
He moved to London and worked at the BBC under Peter Ustinov. He then went to Paris, a destination that better suited his introspective nature and helped shape his music. He had to leave the city just a few months before the riots of May 1968 broke out. His father had died suddenly. A man walked, which became one of his first published songs and also one of his first hits, spoke of this experience of loss and grief.
Her speech was committed, especially to women, but unlike many Spanish singer-songwriters of the sixties and early seventies, Mari Trini never embraced activism. “And that made her misunderstood, in fact, I think that today we still don’t fully understand her. The big problem was that she never wanted to talk about her private life. And she paid dearly for it, because discretion is a virtue that is not heard. What would have happened if Mari Trini had spoken in interviews about her private life, her friends, her family, the house where she lived, her sexuality? “She didn’t talk about what people wanted her to talk about, and that hurt her.”
Mari Trini shared her professional and personal life with Claudette Lanza, who took charge of managing her career after signing with the Hispavox label, where she recorded her most notable hits. In Zecco’s book, the word “lesbian” does not appear once. “It was a conscious decision on my part and there are those who have criticized me for it. It’s not that I don’t want to give visibility to lesbians, in fact, I think it’s something very necessary, but if she never talked about it, I didn’t want to. There are those who tell me that if he didn’t talk about it, it’s because he couldn’t. He could have done it after the advent of democracy, but he didn’t want to.” This journalist recalls an interview in a popular gossip magazine published in the 2000s, in which he asked: “Mari Trini, why didn’t you get married?” To which she replied: “Because I didn’t want to.”
If Mari Trini didn’t want to talk about intimacy, it’s because she wanted to be valued exclusively for her songs. The truth, Zecco points out, is that if you listen carefully to what her lyrics say, she is there, saying much more than she has said through any other medium. “It’s all in their songs, they have a very powerful message. They have a vision completely ahead of their time. I believe that a good songwriter is one who has a message and knows how to convey it.
One of his most popular compositions is I am not that, recorded in 1971, with production by Rafael Trabucchelli and arrangements by Waldo de los Ríos. “The lyrics represent very well what Mari Trini was. This girl, yes, no… With this contradiction, what she does is present herself as the woman she was culturally and socially, because she came from a wealthy family, but then she tells you that no, this girl is exactly what she is. not. wants to be. In her songs, there are many phrases like that, phrases that show a context and then subvert it.
Zecco also points out that one of the reasons why Mari Trini does not identify with the usual singer-songwriter format is the musical packaging with which she presented her music. In the late seventies, he began working with the composer and arranger Maryní Callejo, “another figure unknown to the general public because it is common for those who work in the shadows to not be popular. This also happened with Manuel Alejandro, although his importance is beginning to be widely known. Maryní, present in songs like A kiss and a flower, Eva Maria is gone, Tell me either A star in my garden, Mari Trini herself is another fundamental figure in Spanish music of the last 50 years.
Zecco recommends to anyone who is not familiar with Mari Trini’s work to start with her early albums, especially love (1970) and listen to me (1971). And to those who are already initiated, I would recommend Windows (1973) and WHO (1974). Zecco recounts the latter in his book, which can be considered his masterpiece, the artistic apogee of a woman who fought tirelessly not to be judged on her physical appearance or her withdrawn personality (“you want to make me sad, dark”, he reproached her (to an interviewer). Sole Giménez, Christina Rosenvinge, La Bien Querida, Tulsa and Rozalén are some of the female voices that offer their testimony in Zecco’s book. At the time, Mari Trini opened the doors to women like Cecilia, Massiel or María del Mar Bonet. Today more than ever, you must continue to open them.
