Daymé Arocena Makes Musical and Personal Transformations with "Alkemi"

March 19, 2024

Many experiences came together for Cuban musician Daymé Arocena to achieve her album "Alkemi", in which through jazz, pop and Afro-Caribbean rhythms she takes a journey of introspection about her path toward self-love and maturity.

"Paradoxically, the album's name came through music and the idea was to talk about musical transformations, about mixtures and the coming together of genres and in the end both 'Alkemi' and I ended up transforming each other and I am a new woman after this album," she said. "It has made me transition toward a better version of myself and toward a Daymé I didn't know."

Arocena was born in Cuba in a house where music was the essence, in a rumbera family. "I started singing as soon as I started existing," she said. "I was simply already destined for that." When she was 10 years old, she entered the conservatory and by 19, she had graduated with a degree in choral conducting.

But she has a very jazzy connection. Her father is a fan of smooth jazz, funk and bands like Earth Wind & Fire, which she grew up listening to, but her big leap into the genre came with her school's big band.

"They needed singers and they made me the proposal to sing in the big band and I had to learn it that way, by trial and error, singing the genre because they didn't have time for me," she noted.

After her full-length albums "Nueva Era", "Cubafonía" and "Sonocardiogram", "Alkemi" is her first release since 2019 and the first one she makes outside of Cuba. The album was produced by Eduardo Cabra.

"There are many flavors, because immigration transforms all of us, when one leaves their land, leaves their people, leaves their customs, to insert themselves in another space, definitely there are a lot of things that change," she said.

During the pandemic she lived through a moment of great anguish because she wondered if she would be able to return to a stage. "It's the only thing that has made me feel so unstable and emotionally vulnerable," she said. "I had nightmares about it."

So she looked for ways to relax and one of them was dancing, she even danced alone to calm herself in the midst of chaos. That made her realize that she had moved away from musical genres like pop, which she had always loved.

"They had sold me the idea that they weren't for me," she said. "One needs role models to imagine oneself in a space, but I didn't have role models who did it like me… That pop world I only saw in women who are very different physically from what I am and in Anglo women, who did look like me, but I'm going to be Latina my whole life, I have no way of changing my identity."

This led her to ask herself deeper questions about the perspective she grew up with and to discover that it wasn't worth trying to be someone different from her essence to fit into a world "that in the end doesn't belong to me."

"I understand now that it's not me who is wrong for being Black or for being fat, I have nothing that limits me artistically or creatively," she said. "The limitations come from external things that are not exactly me."

Arocena now considers herself a champion for inclusion and diversity in music.

"If there's no space for me, we're going to create it, if there are no spaces for women like me, we're going to create it, if there are no role models like me, we're going to create them," she pointed out. "I prefer to die performing and doing and transforming than to live in the comfort zone."

One of the English-language songs on the album, "American Boy," arose from a related experience. She had composed it almost a decade ago, but had never dared to show it to the world. She dedicates it to an ex who met her when she was 22 years old, at a time when her self-esteem was very low. He was blonde, with blue eyes, very different physically and he fell in love with her at first sight when he heard her perform the classic "National Boy" at the Havana Jazz Festival.

"He took my hand and we started walking together all over Havana hand in hand and I remember that for me that was like something unimaginable," she said. "That simple act of taking my hand and walking me down the street was like too transformative for me."

But he left, their romance lasted as long as the festival. The song tells how Arocena felt and how she felt the city went dark.

"I felt that my life had gone away with him," she said. "In the end I discovered that he came into my life to teach me a lesson about self-love that I didn't know."

She went through an entire process to lose her fear of the public eye, stop paying attention to bullying and open herself to discover herself.

"I look at myself in the mirror and I start to dance, that transition is good to tell it from the beginning, from my insecurities, from the times when I believed that my life and my happiness depended on another person, because that's the real story," she said.

"A fuego lento," a sensual theme with reggae touches, which features Vicente García as a guest, she composed when she was about 19 years old, now she is 32.

"I was terrified to talk about and exploit my sexuality in public that way, I felt super exposed and it was a song I hid for a long time," she said. "Women want, women desire too, we like people too and we want to propose too."

In "Die and Live Again," an English and Spanish song, Arocena's voice sounds like two people singing. She composed it for her husband, with whom she emigrated, first to Canada and then to Puerto Rico. Beyond the contrast of her voice, the song begins as a reflection on the love they have lived for seven years and the second is a celebration of what they have built.

"It's a very particular love, because we were very good friends for years before being a couple," she said. "The happiness of loving without reservation, but also loving without pressure."