Caro Luna

TRANSCRIPT

My name is Caroline Schröder, as an artist I call myself Caro Luna. And right now I am in Stockholm in Sweden where I was born, but my parents are both from Uruguay and they came in the '70s to Sweden, yeah.

So they came here as political refugees due to the dictatorship in Uruguay, and I was born like a year after they came here. And I also have been living in different parts for different periods in South America. So that's basically me.

When I was little, before the democracy came back to Uruguay in 1985, we went a lot to Mexico. My parents were worked for SAS, the Scandinavian Airlines. So that made it a lot easier for us to be able to travel. So I traveled a lot as a kid. I almost grew up on airports.

When I was a kid, since my first name and my last name they don't sound South American – I have a German last name because my grandfather's family are from Hamburg, Germany. My ancestors are from Germany, France, Spain and Italy, and they immigrated to Uruguay. So, because of that, I don't look like people imagine a person from South America – that could be different things – but I'm not the typical. And if you don't know about Uruguayan or Argentinian history, you might think that everybody looks pretty much the same, but in these parts the roots are European. So with this last name, with my looks, and the fact that my parents they wanted to be part of the Swedish society, and I have been raised here in Sweden, so for me, I have always been able to choose which identity favors me in a situation.

My father who was here first – he was he was a political prisoner for five years in Montevideo. They let him go if he left the country. So they took him straight to the airport where the whole family met. I have pictures of this. My father is, you know, no hair, very thin. I always, I didn't know what that picture was. It was when they went to say “hi and goodbye” to him because he had to leave. So he came first to Stockholm. I think my mother, at that point, and my sister was already five years, they were in Mexico then and they went a couple of months later to Sweden.

So my father, he rented a place to stay. And this lady at the embassy, she said to him, she was Uruguayan, she took a map and she showed him: “Okay, you don't live here! don't live here! don't live here! you should live here, or here!” So she wanted him to be in a place where he could learn Swedish, where he could, you know, come and learn Swedish, the culture fast.

But for me, there were no others like me. So the only person I could speak Spanish with was the person who cleaned in my school. I remember I was very proud having another culture. I liked the fact that I was not only Swedish and I felt like I could choose if I wanted to tell somebody about this or not, because nobody thought I was from South America.

I have many friends that look like maybe more typical what people expect somebody from South America to look like, or that have, you know, Spanish sounding names. The first question: "Oh, where are you from?" They can't choose. People are always like expecting something from them. But nobody was expecting anything from me. So I had it, I kept it. It was like a little treasure. It wasn't a secret. But it wasn't something... It was something I told if I wanted to. Yeah, if I wanted to. If I found that, okay, this person is sincerely interested. Or this person maybe had traveled to South America and knew something. Then I could, you know, “My parents are from...” “Oh, are they? Wow.” And then we could talk about that.

It has made my life so much easier in so many ways. I always think, "Oh, I'm so grateful that I have this double glasses that I have.” I can see things from other perspectives easier than maybe somebody. I'm not saying you have to be from another country, you know, or you have to be bilingual to do that. Not at all. I think you need to feel a bit different everywhere you go. Because when I am in Sweden, I can feel more South American, and when I go to Uruguay, I see I am much more Swedish than I pretend to be. So it's like it's there when I am traveling that I realize that I have my both cultures all the time with me – like you always have your own little country inside you.

But this is important. My daughter's second generation of immigrant. Immigrant – there is a word for it. And like, you will always be... And the Swedish word for immigrant is "invandrare", the ones who walked here. And "vandra" is the same, "to wander” "to walk." And my daughter asked me: "For how long are you... when will they stop walking?" She was talking about the immigrants.

And she was like: "When will they stop this walking? When will they be Swedish?" You know, just be called Swedish.

It's interesting, I think, even in the world, it's a symbolic thing about identity. Who decides who belongs where. And yeah, when my daughter asked me these question, I told her that I think everybody will never stop walking actually, because the world changes, and my ancestors came from Europe to South America. They were immigrants there, and then my parents came back to Europe, and who knows what's happening in 20 years from now. So I think we will never stop walking. People will have different reasons to leave their country where they were born and and to find something new, something else. Not all of us or all of them, but yeah, it's part of what we have created, I think in our society – or for all those reasons like peace, war, the climate changes everything. We invented this system ourselves. We almost force people – or not almost – we force people to migrate.

And I just decided to look at it as instead of feeling trapped, I've tried to see it as I have so much more. There is no perfect country. There is not one single country that is perfect. where I want to live. There are good things about Sweden. There are good things about Uruguay There are good things about and there are bad things about all places. So the important thing for me is to make my own country inside of me, where I can always bring what's important for me. Like in the music.

Music plays a very important thing in this bridge building thing. First of all, when in composing, I am able to travel in a sense, in different dimensions, or I don't know. When I compose, there is one feeling. When I record, there is a feeling of traveling. And I also meet a lot of people from different places thanks to the music, So yeah, for me, the music it has a lot to enrich, it enriches my life so much, in so many levels – socially, culturally. I mean my quality of life is so much better. I don't know what who or what I would have been without music.

I started with music as a kid, and I still remember the moment when I when I really felt “this is it.” Because my grandmother – my mother's mother – came to Stockholm and stayed with us for the Swedish summer. We had a piano at home, and she just – even though she hadn't played in a long time – she just sat there and like improvised. And she played so beautifully. And I sat beside her. I was like maybe seven years old or something like that. And I really remember this. I have so very nice memory of this. And she played the boleros, she played some classical piece, tango and different things. And I said “Oh, you have to teach me!” And she was like: “Oh, this is difficult to teach, because then you have to go down to basics, to details of what am I actually doing.” But she managed to. So that's how I started.

And I started going to the piano, and I started taking classes. I was like nine, I think. And after high school, after I graduated, I did went to Havana, Cuba to study music. And so I always been working with music since I was, yeah, 12 or something like that. And I've done different projects, different bands. But as Caro Luna, it is the first time, it's my first, like, solo project. I felt, like, first it was really difficult. But then after my first song that I made for my mother who passed, "A mi madre," that was how this project started.

My mother got Alzheimer's disease, very young. She was only 56, and she passed in 2016. After she passed, I really wanted to make a song for her, but I also had passed through not only my mother's death, my best friend's death, I separated from my daughter's father that I had been doing music with. So after all of this, I felt I was like empty. I had this real crisis and I didn't feel I could do anything with music anymore anymore.

I remember I went with her to a concert in Montevideo with a group – they were very popular when she was young – and they had this reunion concert. So we went there, and when she heard these songs – she was in a pretty bad shape then – and suddenly when she heard the songs, and she was like transported to when she was, I don't know 20 or something like that. S he suddenly was like talking whole sentences. She was herself again for a couple of minutes.... and then it just disappeared. The moment just passed. But I will never forget that. So I know what music can do with people. It's amazing. I know what it did to me. So it's like the medicine for a lot of people.

And two years after she died, I started studying music therapy and started working with that. Also the work I was doing, meeting people and connecting without words, connecting through music. That's also part of all that then came out, but I wasn't composing then. I was still like doing some gigs here and there and, you know, but I wasn't taking it so seriously and I wasn't putting my soul into it as I feel I am doing now. Yeah.

So that's what I work with during the days now – music therapy – because I really understood how magical this was, a medicine. I think it's wonderful that music is so many things. It's so much more than.... I mean, I love to have concerts, to meet people, to be on a stage. That's amazing. But music can be used in so many more ways. And when I realized that – really realized that through my mother – it grew even more, the love I have for music.

So after five years I got a phone call. They asked me: “Can you make songs for an album? It has to be in Spanish, but you can choose how it will sound like or everything. It's up to you. And we pay for the studio, everything.” I said, "Of course, I will. Yes.” And then I was like, "Oh my god, I haven't done music in such a long time and how am I going to start this creative process?" But I remember I sat down and just the song for my mother, that had taken me five years, it just came suddenly. It was there, and the process of making it was like my process of grief. You know, I was like crying while I was writing. So after that I felt like I was almost reborn. It was like this cleansing, like catharsis, and I just kept on doing more songs and more songs. It was so much that feeling finally could come out. Because I felt free, like the first time in a very long time, I felt creatively free or musically free. And it has given me so much just to be able to be creative again, and to have found this home – music home – which Caro Luna is for me, because finally I can use my identities and mix them. I can absolutely recognize that with Caro Luna, with this project, I am on a mission. I need to do this, in some way, to heal myself, and maybe to help other people to heal.

We need this, as medicine or things that people can connect to so we can, yeah, heal together. Yeah.