Iván Ferreiro: 35 años de carrera sin rendirse al algoritmo

Iván Ferreiro is fifty-five years old and has spent thirty-five of those years on stage. He started with a band called Los Piratas in the 1980s, then went solo, and never stopped working. Now he's on the road again with a tour called "Hoy X Ayer"—Today and Yesterday—that will take him through twenty-five Spanish cities and into Mexico before the year ends. He's been waiting for this. After the opening shows in Bilbao and A Coruña, he sat down before a Barcelona date in mid-May and talked about what drives him after all this time.

The tour is a kind of retrospective. Ferreiro has built a setlist that reaches back across his entire career, pulling songs from his years with Los Piratas and everything he's made since. But he didn't include everything. He left out the pieces that no longer fit him—songs he wrote when he was twenty-five or thirty, melodies and lyrics that made sense then but don't anymore. "When you write a song, you learn something," he explained. "I wrote a lot of things when I was young that I don't enjoy playing now. The text bothers me, or the melody, or the way it's arranged." So he made a careful selection: only the songs that still feel alive to him, that still have something to say.

What matters most to Ferreiro is that he likes what he's playing. This is not a small thing in an industry increasingly obsessed with metrics. Streaming platforms have become the gatekeepers of reach, and the algorithms that govern them shape what gets heard and what doesn't. Most musicians have learned to think about these invisible forces when they write. Ferreiro refuses. "When I write, I think about myself and whether I like the song," he said. "I don't think about the algorithm. I don't even know how it works, and I've never tried to learn. So I wouldn't know how to write for it anyway." He believes this approach—writing for himself first—is what makes a song as good as it can be. The paradox is that it seems to work. He's remained successful without chasing the algorithm's preferences.

Beyond the music itself, Ferreiro has become a public voice on mental health. Over his career, he's spoken openly about his own struggles with depression and anxiety. He sees the arts—music, but also sport, exercise, walking—as tools that help when those struggles arrive. "When there are problems with depression or anxiety, there are many things that help us," he said. "Going for a walk, exercising, listening to music. The arts help us mitigate certain feelings." It's a perspective born from experience, not theory.

On collaborations, he takes them as they come. "When they appear naturally, I do them," he said. "But I don't make many plans about it." And the future? He doesn't have a roadmap yet. There's a whole tour ahead of him, and he's waiting to see what inspiration arrives along the way. For now, he's focused on the road, on the songs he wants to sing, and on the people who will listen.