Rojo

To My Listeners,

What if music could preserve the people, places, and moments we are afraid to lose?

Perhaps it does.

Perhaps every melody we have ever loved keeps something for us—a face, a place, the warmth of a hand, a version of ourselves we thought had disappeared. And perhaps, when we listen again, time opens for an instant and gives it back.

That possibility lives at the heart of Rojo.

Rojo began as my musical autobiography: a record presenting masterpieces of the Spanish and Latin American repertoire for classical guitar, curated in a very personal way, shaped by memory, heritage, grief, resilience, and love. But it was never just about that. It was about forging with my grief something that could reflect emotions and states of the soul that we all go through as part of our human experience. 

I recorded it during one of the most vulnerable chapters of my life, after losing one of the most important people in my life, selling the family home in Cuba(along with all of its remains, mementos and most of the personal things and artifacts that belonged to diverse generations in my family) and grieving not only her, but a part of my life, a part of my story, a chapter of my family history that will never come back, and while recording at the studio, my aim was to be as honest as possible with my playing, and, like Hephaestus, to create with my sorrow something beautiful that could reflect the diverse stages of human emotions. I did not want to hide that humanity. So, the breaths remained in the sound of this album, some sights, too. The fragility remained. The sorrow remained. But so did the laughter that finds its way home, as recording it became, too, part of my inner healing. So, there is the joy that returns when we least expect it, too, on this album, and the love as a creative life force burning at the center.

For me, Rojo (red) is the color of that fire. Passion, strength, life, intensity, remembrance. It is the blood of my inheritance and the flame of passion that urges us humans to keep going. It belongs to those who came before us, to those who walk beside us, and to the dreams we carry forward in their name.

I thought I was making an album about my memories.
Then I understood that we all have a Rojo.

We all have people who continue living somewhere inside us. Places we can return to only by closing our eyes. Loves that changed us. Losses that divided time into before and after. Dreams we abandoned and dreams that refused to abandon us.

And woven through all of it, there is music.

Music has the mysterious ability to find the rooms within us that words cannot enter. A melody can summon someone across years. A chord that can loosen a grief we thought we had learned to carry. A rhythm can return us to our bodies, to celebration, to the simple miracle of being here. And when life is beautiful, music seems to make the light brighter, as though joy itself needed a song in order to become a memory.

In this way, music becomes part of our personal mythology and narrative. It gives our days a soundtrack, our memories a voice, and our emotions somewhere to go.

That is what I hope Rojo can become for you.
I hope that somewhere between a note and a silence, my story disappears and yours begins.
Perhaps you will find someone you miss.
Perhaps a place you once loved.
Perhaps a dream.
Perhaps yourself.

Because Rojo is ultimately not an album about grief, nor even about memory. It is about the strange and beautiful privilege of being alive: to love knowing we may lose, to remember knowing we cannot return, to dream without knowing where the dream will take us—and still to choose, again and again, to live with passion.

- Laura Mazon Franqui

09/08/2026