Mazoni (Jaume Pla): "To make music again, it helped me a lot to know that nobody was waiting for me"

PalmaIn 2024, twenty years after launching the musical project Mazoni, the captain behind it, Jaume Pla (la Bisbal d’Empordà, 1977), decided he had to stop. The alarms were clear: “Before some concerts, I thought that if it rained and I got paid, it was fine. That thought scared me. A musician can't not want to go out and play,” he says in a conversation with ARA Balears. This week he has two concerts in the Islands to present the album he released last September, Banderes per daltònics, a return to the most pop sounds in the project's history: on Thursday, August 20, he will be at Jazzbah in Ciutadella; on Friday, August 21, he will present the album in Santanyí (in the courtyard of Col·legi Bisbe Verger), in a concert that is part of the summer festival program of the Fundació Mallorca Literària, La Lluna en Vers. They will be concerts with the whole band: “The last few times I've come to Mallorca, I've been solo. I'm very excited to come with the whole group to do these two concerts, for them to be energetic and to find that feeling that you seem to be floating when you make music. I think it's an album that is enjoyed more as a group”.

You stopped the Mazoni project at the beginning of 2024 because you needed to rethink the future. You were planning to express yourselves through literature. What happened so that, finally, the songs took center stage once again until Banderes per daltònics was released?

— I returned with Banderes per daltònics and, in a way, it was returning to my origins. Reconnecting with music that I had liked during adolescence, and that had played a very prominent role in my early albums, but which lately didn't have as much. This space I gave myself was good for me to get excited again. Especially because I had no expectations. I wanted to write something that wasn't music: a short story, a novel, something like that. And just when I was at that moment when I hadn't even started writing yet, songs began to come to me without looking for them. When I already had three or four, I thought: let's take advantage of it. Perhaps this, the pressure of having to make songs, was precisely what was blocking me.

Working without pressure is also working with more freedom?

— It helped me a lot to know that nobody was waiting for me. I didn't have a release date, there wasn't that pressure to make an album. So I could take my time. Normally, I make albums faster, when I have the songs, we start working on them. This time I made a lot of songs and then I sorted them out. I focused mainly on the enjoyment part, rather than the work part. And there's something else too: I didn't have to worry at all about promotion through social media.

Don't go on social media because they are another source of pressure, right?

— I don't know how someone who has already been born and grown up in the digital age experiences it. When I started, everything was completely different: we used to send cassettes by postal mail to magazines and record labels. I've seen many changes and, above all, the fact that change is constant: stages pass very quickly and there is a lot of pressure. We receive pressure from everyone to promote, and we are willing to do it, obviously, but we are musicians before anything else. There are weeks when you don't even play the guitar. It's true, and it must be said, that back then things were much more expensive; now the process of making a record has become much cheaper. In any case, things lasted longer. Now everything goes very fast and new platforms and new ways of promoting constantly appear. Perhaps in a while Instagram will be obsolete and there will be another one. It's a feeling of permanent change and I think this immediacy also generates a lot of anxiety.

You explained that this album recovers a sound very linked to Mazoni's early albums, with pop melodies and a sixties aesthetic.

— Yes. I have focused on the music I have enjoyed since I was young. People who have followed my career say that Flags for colorblind people resembles the early records more than the latter ones I had been making.

Does the music you listen to make you want to make music?

— It depends. I can listen to jazz, classical music... Music influences me, but not for stylistic reasons, but for how it makes me feel. I believe that songs come to me more from other places, like from cinema. There are movie lines that stay in my head and can be the beginning of a song. I am awake and attentive. When I read, when I look at things, when I listen to music... There are things that catch my attention and I take notes.

In ‘Ja no em lliguen les cadenes’, one of the songs on the album, you talk about the dependence we can have on some things. Does the music industry generate dependencies? Does it tie you down or push you to do things you wouldn't do?

— I must say that I have made the album I wanted to make at every moment. I have always had absolute freedom, and I am very grateful to BankRobber for that. The pressure that weighed on me the most was the difficulty of selling tickets in some places, of thinking whether the album will be liked or not, whether you will be hired, whether it will have a return… This is detrimental to the more enjoyable part of making an album. I have spent summers without playing any gigs.

And how was the return?

— I think it went very well for us, people were curious to see what we had done after the break. There is a scene in the film The Blue Star (2023) that has stayed with me. The film is about a musician who goes to Argentina, meets older musicians, and a man tells him something like that to make music you have to be relaxed, that ideas have to be able to come to you and you have to have the capacity to welcome them. Being tense makes things not flow as much. So all this pressure, or the constraints that can exist in the industry, is not so much related to making music that I don't like, as it is to ensuring that when I am making it, I am happy and relaxed so that I can create comfortably.