Buried Faith and LSD: La Vida Bohème Finds Solace in ‘La Lucha’

For Henry D'Arthenay, frontman of La Vida Bohème, writing music was an exorcism of sorts. While the expulsion of lyrics on La Lucha, their third and most revelatory efforts to date, served as an eye-opening jaunt of self-reflection, it nonetheless left the 28-year-old belter/guitarist with an indelible mark: to always write with truth. Alongside long-time friends and bandmates—bassist Rafael Perez, drummer Sebastián Ayala, and guitarist Daniel De Sousa—La Vida Bohème delivers loads of introspective thought and cultural observations on their upcoming album (due March 24). But that transition, from 2013's Será—a raucous jangle-pop tribute to Venezuela which celebrates despair—to 2017's La Lucha, wasn't exactly smooth sailing.

Despite D'Arthenay losing his mother last year, getting mugged at gunpoint in Mexico City, and discovering himself further through an LSD trip, La Lucha soul-searches through pain and struggle. "Many years blind / now that I'm here I ask / does it bother you if I sing," he asks on the opening, noisy track "Vôce" and comes full circle on the closing "Domingo" ("if this is how it feels like to be alone / then we will never be alone"), a meditative ballad over delicate string finger-picking. Meanwhile, his angelic coo conveys both hope and urgency. Sonically, the full-length is packed with environmental field recordings from their travels, all the way from subway noise to splashy waves, which makes for a sensorial delight. There are the vital, modern sounds of commanding synth riffs and piercing guitar licks, but the record finds its grounding in old-timey folk form. Even solely based on their forest green-hued album cover, you'll notice a fitting, kaleidoscopic image of the band surrounded in nature.

All in all, there's a sea of beauty and complexity going on with La Lucha, one that, as D'Arthenay put it, has revealed a new sense of purpose through life's wounds.

Listen to the premiere of La Vida Bohème's new song, "Lejos," below:

Noisey: Hey! I hear you guys are living in Mexico City now. How's the city treating you? Is that where you recorded your new album La Lucha ?
Henry D'Arthenay: It's going good. We've been living in Mexico City for three years now. And as far as recording the whole album here—not entirely. La Lucha was recorded between 2013 and 2016, and much of it was done in different parts of the world while promoting Será. What was strange is that we recorded in non-controlled spaces. There's lots of recording from Caracas, Santiago de Chile, San Juan de Puerto Rico, Ciudad de México, Madrid, and California. The main thing is that we got sounds of birds and the sea. We have our guitars and equipment set up in our studio in Mexico City, but we were improvising and exploring throughout the compositions while on tour.

On the intro track, you use a very beautiful, reflective speech by former Uruguayan president, José Mujica. Can you talk about why you decided to use him as the opening protagonist?
It's actually an interview I did with him. We were pursuing to ask someone of age and experience the questions of "What is your struggle? What was your struggle? What was it like to struggle?"—getting perspective from that angle and to shed some light on it. We were recording with Eduardo (Cabra, a.k.a. Visitante) of Calle 13 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, and he suggested Jose Mujica. We all are fans of his writing, his speeches, and his way of thinking, so we said, "Let's try it out!" So Eduardo went to Uruguay, and he granted us that interview very late at night. What you actually hear is a one-minute response of him of his struggles. The first words that came out of his mouth on the recording are " Mi Lucha más grande ha sido conmigo mismo (My biggest struggle has been with myself)." We were very respectful of that. We weren't expecting to receive that statement, and when we did, it changed our lives. Even with what he said, "La lucha"— that ended up being the title of the album.

Did you have the album concept solidified before the interview or did that came after?
We were almost finished with the record, but we weren't aware of what the album was about until we heard that phrase. Subconsciously, I think we were looking for that answer. It's like we've been rowing for years, not knowing if we'd arrive at safe harbor. It showed us a mirror, right in front of us! And just before the album ends, on tracks "La Respuesta" and "Domingo," there are other interviews but with kids, sons and daughters of our friends. It's like the circle's complete.

Your songwriting is very observational but also introspective. One that stood out to me was "Lejos." Is it dedicated to being far away from your home country?
With all the songs, lyrically, there was a lot of exorcism. Our faiths were buried, and I didn't like quite understand them. Writing was a process of understanding. I've been in Mexico for the past few years, but when I was 17 up until 22, I lived in Spain. Afterwards, we were in Venezuela, and during that time there, we traveled abroad a lot because the band was starting to happen. After years of feeling displaced—being far away, being immigrants, being nomads—my take is that being "far away" is a state of mind. I believe that everyone who has an artistic tendency eventually comes to a point in life where you want to move into a shack in fucking Norway, or whatever, for example, and be at peace using that introspective, in a lonely kind of way. In a more practical sense, when you live in a shitty place, you're always seeing that the grass is greener on the other side. It's like a paradox: the farther you go away, you then understand that it was only far within yourself.

The trilogy concept of your three album titles is interesting: " Nuestra Será La Lucha (Ours Will Be the Struggle)." When listening to Nuestra , I felt that you pulled a lot from the exterior, citing plenty of cultural references, from Aldous Huxley to the Ramones. Será is more tied to Venezuelan roots and identity, and La Lucha is about reflecting yet seeking outward again. Did you have this pattern in mind or did it evolve within time?
Imagine this: You start picking at a rock with a spoon, and suddenly a little hole appears. Once you see it's there, you start scratching it, and maybe you'll even find sulfur. By the time you hit sulfur you are so deep that you just have to keep going further. Before you started digging, the idea of sulfur or gold didn't make sense, but gold, however, is an incentive to keep digging. That's where our journey with Nuestra began. You could say that with Será, we were very deep into it. If you continue to dig, you just do it because you're already in there; you've already introduced something. You could listen to Nuestra, Será, and La Lucha separately, but if you have listened to them together, there's a unity. Nuestra complements Será, and Será compliments La Lucha. With Nuestra, almost all of the songs are about "we"—it's "ours." Será can mean so many different things, like "will be." The concept of La Lucha started during our relocation. As band members, we sacrificed leaving our families and girlfriends. We fought and struggled with our environment, not only as immigrants but as people.

I read that relocating to Mexico City was a healing process for you. How did a new change of environment play a role in your creativity?
I believe that you don't choose what will heal you. For me personally it has been hard because—well, the thing is that I can't speak objectively about this because last year was the death of my mom. I understand the concept of being an orphan now. Do you know what a gaucho is?

Wow. I'm sorry. And, yes, an Argentine cowboy.
Yes, but in Quechua it also means orphan. If you are a person interested in the roots of things, especially nature. Gauchos are like nomads, migratory horsemen. It's about you and nature; you and the world. Subjectively, the album changed my perception of life and personal feelings. I actually understood that it is me and the world, and the world and me. We are one. Sometimes death can be healing, in a way. I wasn't expecting death to be a release. At the end, it's about passing down the torch. She carried it for a long time, and she was always that fire. Our parents teach us to keep it alive. I believe that La Lucha, more than healing, has to do with time rather than space. It's about this time required from us to heal and continue to keep the flame alive.

What were some of your biggest revelations with finalizing the album?
While we were in the process of songwriting, a Venezuelan hip-hop artist named Canserbero that we admire died really young. He always put himself on the fire, through a medium where you could experience emotions, life. I had a revelation to keep on writing with truth. The other revelation was when I did LSD for the first time in my life. It was in Chapultepec, the forest. Before that, I was very methodical, and I couldn't see beauty in curves. Also, if you read about (LSD inventor and chemist Albert) Hofmann, who was a humanistic person with a deep mind, he said that these things (psychedelics) don't just have to be recreational. They could also be spiritual, and they were used for all these reasons: internal reflection, inner thoughts.

Did you write any material on LSD?
No, but my perception afterwards did change a lot. For the first time I could see. Scientifically, I always knew that things are always moving: atoms, molecules, things are always interacting, transforming. Nothing is static in the world. But seeing it! I understood that art and life have to be like mirrors, constantly dialed and reflecting each other—a mirror in front of a mirror. It is the duty of artists and their art to reflect the world. To give it this endless possibility. So for me realizing and understanding that, in terms of the album, sonically, it couldn't have been something static. It had to be something with movement, something organic.

Photos courtesy of Nacional Records

Isabela Raygoza is a writer based in New York. Follow her on Twitter.