By Steve Wildsmith (stevew@thedailytimes.com)
No matter how hard he tried, Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter Elsten Torres couldn’t outrun the fiery Cuban blood in his veins.
Not that he wanted to forget about his background. But his mother took him from Cuba before he was 2 years old, and even though he grew up in a household where Cuban music was in constant rotation and was constantly reminded that his father was imprisoned back on the island for speaking out against the Castro regime, he was also growing up to be an American kid.
“I grew up in a Cuban household, but I was speaking English and listening to American and British music growing up, and I gravitated toward that style of music,” Torres told The Daily Times during a recent interview. “That was the first music I fell in love with, and by the time I was 5, I was collecting Elvis records. Even though my uncle was a singer-songwriter who played all the Cuban songs and I grew up in both worlds, I rejected my background as a rebellious teen.
“But then I got older, and I started liking it more. I dug more into it, and when I moved to Miami in 1994, and was kind of one of the pioneers of the whole Latin rock movement, and my band was credited with being one of the first Latin rock-based bands signed to a major label. As I developed more as a songwriter, I gravitated more toward the Latin side, but I’ve always maintained my Americana side.”
These days, Torres — who will perform this weekend as the opening act for The Family Stone — embraces both his Cuban and American influences. As a typical American teen, he discovered his first influence in high school — on the floor as he walked to his English class. It was a love note written by one student to another, and it inspired Torres to write his first song.
“Something clicked in that moment, and being a big Beatles fan also – I loved their songs and the way they put songs together – that it became an obsession, and I started writing and writing and practicing my guitar. At one point, I showed them to a friend, and he picked out some decent ones for me to play, and we started a little band.
“Seeing people react was pretty cool, and performing, to me, became like learning an instrument: the more you practice, the better you get at it. So I kept developing and listening.”
Around the time he was taking over vocal as well as guitar duties for his teenage band Refugee, he met his father for the first time. Torres was 17, and he wouldn’t fully understand his father’s struggle until he moved to Miami in 1994. With the band Fulano De Tal, he and his bandmates released the anti-Castro protest song “Revolucion.”
“That was the first song that put me on the map, and that’s a direct connection to my dad and all the stuff he went through,” Torres said. “Thematically and musically, he influenced me as a songwriter. I was always politically and socially conscious in my lyrics, and that’s always been a connection with me.”
After releasing two albums, Fulano De Tal broke up, and Torres pursued a solo career. His solo record “Individual” was nominated for a Grammy for Best Latin Pop Album in 2007; two years earlier, he had received a Latin Grammy nomination for Best Song of the Year. He remembers well the 2007 ceremony: Although he’d written songs that had garnered success for fellow Latin stars like Ricky Martin and Julio Iglesias Jr., being a part of the ceremony for the Grammy was “amazing,” he said.
“Being there for my own album — an independent album I had produced with a co-producer and financed on my own and promoted on my own — was a very special moment to me,” he said.
Not bad for a Cuban kid who grew up in the Big Apple and found himself straddling a line between two worlds.
“Cubans, in particular, are very patriotic, and we like to hold onto the culture — I guess because of the whole political situation,” he said. “That’s why I still have the Cuban stuff in my blood.”