With all this time to self reflect, to look at yourself in the mirror, it’s a pretty popular moment for everyone to reassess what they want from life. From partners, from a career, from their communities.
Tall Juan’s second studio record Atlantico, out this coming Monday, is an album about love. It’s also a tribute to his home continent South America and the African influence upon it. He’d always planned to self-release, but with everything happening, his plan changed and his whole perspective on how to share this love letter changed:
“At the beginning, I had mixed feelings about doing the release during these crazy times. We are all going through a very tough moment.
“I decided to do it for many reasons. I was already planning on self-releasing it later this year anyways, but when this all happened, like everyone else, everything I had planned for the rest of the year changed and a lot of these plans got canceled. Shows, tours I was gonna do, and later this year was gonna be the album release. Then I realized that we can’t really plan much and that the rules we usually follow in order to put out music made no sense to me anymore, even less during this quarantine.
“I’ve been really feeling the lack of creativity and regretting things I could have done before this all happened and I missed them because of these rules I’ve been following. My main goal right now is to finally share this music, put it out there and to let know as many people as I can. But this time I’m doing it my way, with no rules.”
“Don’t Come” starts out in the Rockaways, in the midst of a spat between two people presumably in love or something like it. Saying something as simple as “don’t come,” especially as drawn out and pleading as it is in the chorus, holds a lot. It’s actually pretty cathartic; asking someone to physically not accompany you says it all. Especially with the perspective we have now, from which human contact is prohibited, it’s also kind of ominous. But the song itself feels like a day at the Rockaways. I guess you’ve got to look at these moments with no regrets, put that failure or that fight away, and keep it for hindsight later.
Listen to the full album Atlantico May 11 here, and follow Tall Juan here and here.