Q&A: Nina del Río’s “No Me Dejes Olvidar” Tenderly Embraces Remembrance
INTERVIEW
INTERVIEW
☆ BY IVONA HOMICIANU ☆
Photo by Carlos Blanco
“NO ME DEJES OLVIDAR” IS A CELEBRATION OF MEMORY—Rooted in Latin American folklore, Nina del Río’s indie release is a soft and quiet mantra anchored in the importance of remembering. It is surrounded by sacred love for the moments that make us who we are, along with the people that change us for the better.
Nina del Río is an Argentinian-American artist who quilts the whimsical nostalgia of acoustic instruments with the modern touch of electronic sounds. She has released two EP’s so far, Suncito (2019) and What I Loved About You Es Lo Que Amo De Mi (2022). This new single marks the beginning of her next project set to be released in spring of next year.
“No Me Dejes Olvidar” enchants with del Río’s soothing voice alongside the harmonious guitar and piano. She takes us by the hand and invites us to consider our attachment to memory and letting go. Throughout the story of the music video, she creates an expansive friendship that perdures through time. The rituals of remembrance echo through the visuals just as they transmit through the music.
Luna discussed with del Río her new release, “No Me Dejes Olvidar,” as well as her upcoming EP.
Photo by Gaia
LUNA: Could you introduce yourself for the people that don’t know you?
DEL RIO: I'm a singer and songwriter. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, but I grew up between here and Buenos Aires, Argentina, which is where me and my family are from. My music exists between both of those places. I put out a song called “No Me Dejes Olvidar,” and I'm about to put out a lot more music.
LUNA: Who is “No Me Dejes Olvidar” addressed to?
DEL RIO: It's very much a stream of consciousness song. In a large way, it's addressed to myself. “No me dejes olvidar” means “Don't let me forget,” so in a lot of ways, it's a reminder of the things that I always want to remember everywhere I go. I thought I was writing it for this guy I liked, back when I wrote it in 2020. I was getting out of a dark time and this was the first person that I was really starting to see and have feelings for after that. I knew that it wasn't meant to be. I knew that it wasn't gonna last but I was trying to enjoy this reminder that the capacity to love and the capacity to enjoy someone else's company, and know someone else like that, is something that you carry within yourself. The way that you love is more a reflection of yourself, your values and your way of going through the world than anything else. Back then, I would have told you it was addressed to him but at this point it's way more of a general thing.
LUNA: What inspired you to write the song?
DEL RIO: I was living in Argentina, the worst of quarantine in the pandemic had just ended and I was finally able to leave the house, because I was living with my grandma. My grandma and I are super, super, super close ... I feel like she's my soulmate. I've lived with her for long periods of time and we have a really special connection. During quarantine, it was already super intense in Argentina, but added to the fact that I was living with a 96 year-old woman … obviously I didn't want to get her sick, so I was inside for a long time. When things started getting a little bit better, I started going out, I started seeing new people, and I wrote this song.
There's a house on the river that has been in my family for about 100 years, since my grandma was born. My grandma grew up going there, my mom grew up going there, and I grew up going there. I was there for the first time since quarantine and I was sleeping in a room that was my great grandmother's room, so there's a bunch of energy in there. I was in a moment where really all I had was music. I was writing every day. I already had all of these ideas going around, and it was just a moment where I sat down, I had my guitar, and it was a stream of consciousness. The song just flowed out. I think I knew it was a really special song to me at that moment. I was actually working on an EP, and I decided not to put it in there, because I was like, “This is something different. This is my entry into the next thing.” Five years later, here we are. It took time to figure out how to produce it, but that was it.
LUNA: It was worth it. It's such a beautiful song.
DEL RIO: Thank you. First of all, you have to really listen to your intuition when it comes to your music. What really affirmed that was that later on, I met the producer of the song who's been my main collaborator for the past few years. His name is Andrés Gonzalez-Cardona. He is really wonderful. He gave the song this other understanding, because for me, the song was very happy. Every time I would perform it, it was very groovy and upbeat, and then we realized while unpacking the song together that there's a lot of heavy stuff in there. It is in a way about death. Not necessarily physical death, but death as a concept of the ending of things, and I think 2020 was very much the end of a cycle or of an era. Something I've been navigating personally for the past few years, which is something that happens to a lot of people in their early 20s, is navigating the idea of death, the fear of death, loving people and knowing that nothing is permanent, and being okay with that impermanence. It was one of those things where the words came out first, and I realized later what they were actually about. Having someone there to process that with me made it what it is now.
LUNA: I found it interesting that you said it's about love, memory and learning to let go - I’m especially curious about what that last part meant.
DEL RIO: I think letting go is something that means something different to anyone who hears it. Letting go for me has been a huge theme. As someone with a lot of anxiety … my anxiety comes from feeling like I need to be ready for any possible scenario and letting go, that's a huge thing with death and endings in general. Sometimes you're in a relationship, and you're preparing yourself to be heartbroken, even though you don't know if you're going to end up heartbroken or with someone you love, and you're preparing for them to one day not be there. It's so scary to accept that you have no idea what's going to happen and you have no way to be ready for it, but that was also a really big thing for me.
LUNA: Could you talk more about the story of the music video?
DEL RIO: I filmed that in Argentina in the house where I wrote the song. That's the house that's been in my family for a very long time. Tying it back to originally, the song was about a boy, but I realized again, with this whole process of unpacking what it really meant to me, that it's really just about how to love and how I want to go through life and love in general. That is so much more than just romantic love, right? Friendship is something that has been so important to me, and in this back and forth between living in New York and living in Argentina, it's also something that I feel like I've had to really work to sustain. Same with family because all of my family is there. I want to grow old with [my friends], they're the people that I know I want to have in my life forever.
I wanted there to be that double story of the grandmothers who are actually us, and it's the memory of things that we've been through as friends and then growing old together. It's up to interpretation; it can also be us as young people looking towards the future and imagining that future, it can go both ways. The past five years, there's been a lot of loss. Seeing that has made me realize how important it is to hold on to them while we have them. All of those things were floating around in the creation of that video, but the really beautiful thing about it is that I made it with my friends. It's really special to be able to make art with friends, and to have it blossom in this way.
LUNA: There's a lot of witchy rituals in the video. I'm especially curious about the one where you're burying the metal string, what does it represent?
DEL RIO: This video was actually going to be for a different song. This was a learning curve for me where I got really excited about a song that wasn't done yet. This was a couple years ago, I was in Argentina and I was like, “Let's make a video.” I had never really done a music video production before. This is a song that will eventually come out, but probably not for a while. It was a song that was very directly about my friends and coming out of a really rough time with your friends. It was about this moment in quarantine, where the only thing that I could do, because I couldn't take public transportation, was ride my bike with my friends; so it was about riding my bike and coming into this new era on the bike with my friends. That little thing is actually a bicycle.
The idea of the music video was exactly that. I'm this little witchy girl who lives in this house on the river, I'm going through a hard time, my friends come to visit me and we do all of these rituals to move past. With a lot of my friends, we have all of these rituals that we do, maybe not burying things, but definitely wishes and manifestations and burning things and stuff like that. We tried to bring that into the story, and we ended up keeping this thing with the bicycle, because I think it's really cool to have the string that connects to other songs. So it's a little hint in there for other moments and other things that will come along later.
LUNA: What activities have you been enjoying lately?
DEL RIO: I love to knit. That's my biggest hobby, and it's the holiday season. I'm trying to watch full movies because I've definitely fallen victim to algorithms and attention, so I watch movies and knit while I watch them. I spend a lot of time with my cats. I've also really been enjoying cooking. I made meatballs from scratch the other day and it was really satisfying. Those are my two love languages, cooking for people and knitting things for people.
LUNA: What movies have you been watching?
DEL RIO: I watched Conclave the other day. That's one of my favorites. I really liked it. I thought it was really beautiful. I just love the world building of something with a lot of lore, like the Catholic Church.
LUNA: You have an upcoming EP, set to release next year. Could you tell us something about it?
DEL RIO: Anything? I'm really excited that “No Me Dejes Olvidar” was the introduction to that EP, because it's the most conceptual of the songs. It's the hardest to pin down one specific thing that it's about. I think it encapsulates all of these different things that I'm navigating in the EP. With any project, there's a lot of thinking of who am I right now, and what do I want to say with this project? Overall, it's like, how do we exist in the world that we're living in? Being very sensitive, very sentimental, how do you find the balance between a memory and understanding the past, also looking forward, also navigating this back and forth that I've done throughout my life.
For me, that's what duality means, but a lot of people feel duality in other senses, and I hope that they feel it in that way. There’s some yearning moments, there's some accepting “this is who I am and this is how I want to live my life” moments. Past, present, future is a big thing. It's feeling very grounded in tradition and family and womanhood. There's a lot of exploration of womanhood and what that means for me and the women in my family and the women who came before me.
LUNA: I'm very excited now to hear it. The question that you said, “How do you live in this world being very sensitive?” With the times that we're in, I feel like a lot of people are asking themselves that.
DEL RIO: I think that it's really hard. You have to make the choice every day to turn off your feelings, or to have a lot of feelings about everything. That's something I think about a lot. Thinking about how to create a life where you can live in accordance with your values and you can prioritize love. It's really hard, especially as artists, a lot of times we have to make these choices of playing into an industry that maybe we don't agree with all the way, but wanting to make our voice heard. That's just something in general in the world that everyone is having to battle those dilemmas.
LUNA: How do you hope your music affects people?
DEL RIO: First of all, I have done a lot of work to be unapologetic in the ways that I feel. I hope that this music gives people a space to feel whatever they need to feel, without judging it and without feeling like it's wrong. Whether that’s an emotional thing, or an identity thing, being unapologetic in your identity and saying, “I am this and I'm also that, and I don't have to choose between these things.” I hope it provides a space to question the way that we do things, and question the way that we live our lives, and the way that we love and interact with people. Someone whose songwriting I really admire is SZA, the way that she will never back away from an ugly thought. That's very, very powerful, because everyone has contradictory thoughts. Listening to her music is really healing for me, because I'm like, “Oh, I'm not crazy.” I hope it provides that. I hope it provides peace. Making music gives me peace so I hope that hearing that music gives someone else peace.
