Ismael Serrano

Born in Spain during the early 1970s, singer and songwriter Ismael Serrano began studying solfa and piano while still a child. Shaped by the Latin nueva trova style, he started composing in his teens, fitting music to verses by established poets. In 1994 he launched his performing career at modest Madrid venues, and PolyGram signed him two years later, resulting in the release of his debut album Atrapados en Azul. Throughout 1997 and 1998 Serrano toured Spain extensively while writing material for the follow-up La Memoria de los Peces. After a successful Latin American trek he delivered Los Paraisos Desiertos in 2000 and maintained a steady output of popular albums for the rest of the decade, five of which entered the national top ten and the final one being 2012’s Todo Empieza y Todo Acaba en Ti. During those years he also issued two live albums and the tenth-anniversary anthology El Viaje de Rosetta, and he appeared in the film El Corazón de Jesus, supplying several songs for its soundtrack. Serrano built his reputation as a protest singer influenced by the leading voices of that movement in the seventies and by Spain’s legacy of radical leftist poetry. Developments in the noughties, including the Iraq War and the Madrid bombings of 2004, furnished plentiful subject matter. He refreshed his sound by weaving in fresh ingredients such as jazz, blues, bossa nova, and metal.