Juan Wauters

Having served as the main songwriter in the Beets, a youthful New York garage-rock outfit, Juan Wauters launched a solo path marked by far simpler textures. His spare compositions, built mostly around voice and acoustic guitar, deliver gentle, almost childlike melodies delivered in Spanish and English alike, as heard on the 2014 release NAP: North American Poetry and the 2019 travelogue La Onda de Juan Pablo, the latter shaped by numerous collaborators. After joining Mac DeMarco for the wide-ranging 2021 set Real Life Situations, Wauters shifted inward on Wandering Rebel, issued in 2023, where he examined the transformations his life had undergone.

Born in Uruguay, Wauters departed in 2002 to reunite with his father, who had moved to New York several years earlier for employment. While employed at a factory, he found relief from monotony and isolation through music and new acquaintances. In 2004 he met José Garcia during a community-college art course; together they started the garage band the Beets, which began issuing records on the Brooklyn independent label Captured Tracks in 2009.

Wauters made his solo debut in 2014 with NAP: North American Poetry, whose gentler, skewed folk approach contrasted sharply with the Beets’ often frantic, Luddite garage rock. The following year he joined forces with fellow artist and touring companion Carmelle Safdie for the brief EP Wearing Leather, Wearing Fur, released by Captured Tracks under the name Juan Wauters & Carmelle and featuring lead vocals from both writers. His second solo album, Who Me?, was tracked late in 2014 and appeared on Captured Tracks in May 2015.

Over the ensuing years Wauters participated in an independent film project in Argentina and traveled extensively through Latin America, enlisting local musicians in each city to create the songs that became La Onda de Juan Pablo, issued by Captured Tracks in January 2019. That May he released Introducing Juan Pablo, a set of recordings made between 2015 and 2016 and conceived as a prelude to the travelogue. Before the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020, Wauters had already been crisscrossing the United States and applying the same collaborative method with artists including Mac DeMarco, Cola Boyy, and Nick Hakim. The resulting 2021 album Real Life Situations merged those sessions with field recordings and intimate solo pieces captured at his New York residence. During the subsequent period of reduced movement, Wauters settled in Uruguay shortly before Real Life Situations appeared, then spent the next year also recording in Los Angeles, New York, and additional locations. Although still informed by the restless curiosity of his earlier work, his sixth solo album, Wandering Rebel, contained his most introspective material to date and arrived on Captured Tracks in June 2023.