Rosalía Shares Tour Essay, Delights Ween Fans, Gets Shoutout From Mick Jagger

Last year's epic Lux earned Rosalía attention from all sorts of listeners, including Mick Jagger, who recently told GQ that he's a fan: "That was something really conceptual, really interesting. And she really pulled it off, and I really admire her for doing it." She also earned attention from Ween fans for posting a vinyl copy of 1994's Chocolate And Cheese on her Instagram story. Is she a connoisseur of the brown sound, or does she merely like the cover art? Hopefully the next person who interviews her will get the scoop.

Meanwhile, Rosalía remains on tour promoting the new LP, which has occasioned a new update from the road. In a blog post headlined "La Tour Life," she discusses her experience onstage and off, and she admits she may not be cut out for the nomadic lifestyle of the touring performer.

The original message is in Spanish, but here it is translated to English:

I’m on tour. I’ve been in Europe, now I’m in the US, and soon I’ll be in Latin America (God willing). At this point, I think I’m about halfway through the tour, and interestingly, I find myself talking more and more on stage—just blurting out whatever pops into my head when I’ve got a microphone in my hand. The other day at the New York show, I started talking about this crazy life, and days later I was still thinking about it, so I’ve decided to pull on that thread.

The thread is this: the nomadic life isn’t for everyone.

My respect goes out to everyone who lives this way. You have to be brave to be a nomad. By "nomadic life," I mean living with your home on your back and a sense of detachment. That detachment, by the way, isn't optional, because a good chunk of what you carry with you will inevitably get lost along the way. Living in a constant state of relocation—far from what is yours, far from your loved ones, or far from your birthplace. Living far from everything you love and hate, yet everything that inevitably reminds you of who you are.

It’s a heartbreaking sacrifice, if you ask me: a house—or a home—isn't just a shelter; it can be the symbolic anchor that holds you up. "Home" can be a person or a clan; it can be a scent, four walls, or your city…

It’s no wonder most artists tend to vent when talking about "tour life," or turn to some form of anesthetic to cope with it—because tour life is no joke. That’s precisely why you try to build a home wherever you go. As a touring musician, I try to do the same—we all do. Luckily, I have help, but nothing and no one can truly prepare you for the process of building and dismantling your home every single day. A drawing from someone you love sitting on the nightstand, t-shirts carefully hung in the closet, lamps you switch on and off until you find "the right light," stacks of books you’ll never have time to read, or that shitty little decorative figurine you hide inside a hotel cabinet because you can’t stand the sight of it for another second. To this day, I’m still struck by the arrogance with which you sometimes walk through and observe these spaces as if they were yours—as if, for a split second, you actually believed your own lie that the hotel room belongs to you.

Building your home and destroying it
Building it and destroying it
building it and destroying it
building it and destroying it

You build it religiously every day. You do it with love, knowing full well you’ll have to tear it all down a few hours later—not out of anger or desire, but simply because you have to leave. You might think you don’t want to get attached to anything since every setup is temporary, or perhaps you wish your love for things would just overflow, finally allowing you to feel the fear, the emptiness, or the anguish each time you have to move on to the next place. Instead, you do what you can in your own way: sometimes you cry, often you dissociate, and on a good day, you whisper a quiet "goodbye" that makes you feel a little better as you close the door, wondering if you’ll ever step foot in there again. Today Las Vegas, tomorrow Los Angeles, the day after San Diego, and so on.

All this is my way of saying that whenever I love a place, I also have reasons for not wanting to leave; it’s also my way of saying I’m afraid of having no roots anywhere. Yet, deep down, I know I carry everything that matters inside me—things I can never lose, because I am, and always will be, an archive of everything I have loved.

Onstage Saturday night at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Rosalía shared a message of solidarity and support for the victims of the deadly earthquakes in Venezuela:

During her Lux shows, Rosalía has been taking a confession, Catholic priest style, from a surprise celebrity guest each night before performing "La Perla." Saturday in Vegas, it was RuPaul's Drag Race star Jewels Sparkles. Other confessional guests on the North American leg have been Marcello Hernandez, Benny Drama, and Harper Watters. At the first of her two NYC shows at Madison Square Garden a couple of weeks ago, it was Maggie Rogers, who told a story about a New York Times journalist that brought her to the newspaper's office to make out in the middle of the night but was later revealed to be cheating on his girlfriend. The story went viral, and Page Six later identified the mystery lothario as travel reporter Stephen Hiltner.

Here's Rogers telling the tale as an expressive Rosalía listens: