The Miami-based singer-songwriter has come a long way in the past decade. Many in the audience, in fact, were fans of Torres from his previous band, Fulano de Tal, which helped pioneer Miami's rock en espa ol movement, along with popular outfits such as La Secta AllStar, Volumen Cero, and the recently retired Bacilos. On this February evening, though, his supporters had gathered to offer Torres a rousing sendoff.
He was on his way to the Grammys, in the hopes his self-released bilingual album, Individual, would nab the award for best Latin pop album. As it turned out, Torres lost to a couple of big names, Guatemala's Ricardo Arjona and Mexico's Julieta Venegas, who shared the award. But that didn't stop him from maintaining a buoyant attitude afterward.
"Getting this far and seeing my name and my album up there was a great feeling and an honor," Torres says, adding, "the fact that my indie album was recognized among all these artists who were signed to major labels was an accomplishment of its own." After years of bum record deals and band breakups, Torres has learned to celebrate whatever good fortune comes his way. He moved to Miami from New York in 1994 and formed a band called Fulano de Tal with a group of recent college grads.
Fulano wrote songs with Spanish lyrics, but the band's sound was an amalgam of British alternative rock, New Wave, and Caribbean rhythms. The band's hit single, "Revolution," recorded on the now-defunct indie label Radio Vox, led to a deal with BMG. In 1997, they released the LP Normal.
Rock en espa ol was hugely popular in places like Argentina and Mexico. But it was virtually unheard of in the United States. Fulano de Tal was, in fact, the first U.
S.-based rock en espa ol band to be signed to a major label. "We were working an indie type of product with a major label, and we realized we had to do a lot of our own footwork," Torres explains.
BMG, for instance, paid for Fulano de Tal to tour the U.S., Canada, and Puerto Rico.
But the label served mainly as a distributor, failing to promote the band in the cities where it played. Before long, Fulano de Tal had inked a separate deal to write a jingle for Pepsi's Generation Next campaign, and decided to return to Radio Vox, figuring it would have more creative freedom. The band's sophomore effort, Etc.
(1999), did receive some airplay on Spanish-language radio in the U.S. and Puerto Rico, but that wasn't enough to keep the band together when bigger stars came calling.
In 2000, guitarist Adam Zimmon and percussionist Brendan Buckley were recruited to play backup for the pop star Shakira. "Obviously I was disappointed, but I understood their position," Torres says. "We had a great sound and great chemistry as a band.
Who knows what would have happened if we would have stayed together?" What is known is that Fulano de Tal opened doors for its peers to be taken seriously by major labels. Bacilos, for example, signed with Warner Music Latina in 2000 and went on to win a Grammy for best Latin pop album, while La Secta AllStar won the backing of Universal Latino, and scored a major hit with its 2005 album Consejo.
Torres didn't spend too long dwelling on what might have been, though. Instead he took a fruitful detour into songwriting for other artists on the Warner/Chappell Music label. Obie Bermudez's recording of Torres's song "Todo el a o" ("All Year") received a Latin Grammy nomination for best song of the year, and had a five-week run as the number one song on the Latin Billboard charts.
Torres was also the composer behind such hits as "Caramelo" (Alejandra Guzman), "Tanto" and "Tatuaje" (J.D. Natasha), and "Por una mujer" (Luis Fonsi).
To top it all off, Julio Iglesias, Jr.'s 2004 recording of Torres's song "Los dem a s" ("The Others") reached the Latin Billboard's top 10 and was honored by BMI as "one of the 50 most performed songs on Spanish radio." Composing paid Torres's bills and gained him some notoriety.
It also helped him experiment with his own sound, which he describes as "an eclectic mix of a Cuban kid growing up in New York listening to The Beatles but hearing Beny Mor e in the background." By 2005, Torres had a catalogue of 50 new songs and was itching to get back in front of the mike himself, so he pieced together an informal band and started performing monthly at Little Havana's Hoy Como Ayer nightclub to test out his tunes. Buckley, on break from his duties with Shakira that summer, liked what he heard, so he jumped into the studio to help Torres co-produce a solo album.
The pair chose a dozen compositions for what would become the multifaceted Individual, with Zimmon and Buckley returning to perform on the recordings.
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