For more than a decade, the Bosnian prince of sevdah God's Sack He creates magic with his voice, which is enjoyed equally by all generations. For him, music is the essence of existence because without it, life would be empty.
He is constantly present on the scene, both in concert and discography, always bringing new strength and depth to his expression. After numerous singles, his seventh studio album “Sevdahology” has recently arrived, representing another musical journey filled with passion and sincerity.
Eight original songs, signed by Vrećo, along with two covers of traditional songs, one of which is an old Montenegrin song "Po ladu po zalada". This time too, Božo gave in to emotions, without calculations, and the first reactions to the album are excellent. Božo Vrećo talks about the "Sevdahology" project for "Vijesti"...
“Sevdaologyja”, your seventh studio album is on the air. From the album, which features eight songs, the audience had the opportunity to hear most of them. Are you satisfied with how the songs “Sevdalino”, “Čemerika”, “Sevlija”, “Ibadullah” and “Jovan” fared? Which one did the audience love at first?
The album is a conceptually transcendent journey through centuries and eras, past lives and different destinies.
I wrote and composed eight songs on the album, so it is a singer-songwriter as expected of me, and two bonus songs are traditional covers: “Po ladu po zalada”, a Montenegrin traditional song, and “Omer i Merima”, an epic Bosnian-Herzegovinian song.
If you had to describe each song on your album, song by song, about the emotion each one carries, how would that story go?
From sadness and sighs to hugs and tenderness, from pain and longing to hope and unwavering love, from tears and sobs to the reunion of those who love each other and will love each other forever.
It is a saga about the eternal, insatiable and indestructible love for God and for that beloved being who becomes the same soul with which those words are spoken, dear and sweet to the heart, true and strong enough to move mountains and part seas. The entire album has an Old Testament confession, something very unfathomable spiritual and spiritual, inexpressible and inexplicable deep in its dedication and the tragedy that a man who carries love endures.
Each of your albums brings something new. This time you combined karasevdah with film music. Sevdah carries pain and nostalgia, while film music often enhances the drama of the story. How difficult was it to find the right balance between the intimacy of sevdah and the epic sound of film music, without overdoing anything?
It is enough to truly let emotions guide and carry us, without calculation, organization, or limitation. Love must overcome reason and utter all these psalms of love, it must write them down, it must live them and experience them as a source of divine light.
The soul is the guiding principle in this immeasurable and timeless singing of love, and this can be felt in the first bars and rhymes throughout the entire album “Sevdahology”, which gains a new structure and definition of the understanding of sevdah as a science, where I introduce a new term and mark a new era of sevdah, collaborating with top musicians such as Itamara Borochova, Ibrahima Babayeva, Sercan Halilija, Miroslav Tadic, Matija Dedić and many others who are part of me and my work.
The interpretation and way you experience sevdah is always authentic and personal. Sevdah is associated with melancholy and loss. How difficult is it to experience and convey through music precisely pain as an emotion that no one likes when they themselves experience it?
All that sadness and pain, as well as love, is healing, no matter how insurmountable it may seem to us and the one that costs us our lives in those difficult emotional oscillations. Music is the divine voice within us and guides us through every stage of life, imagine life without music, what an emptiness and what an absence of love within us, right?!
That is why this empowering and virtuous music that springs up in me flows like mountain rivers from the highest peaks to the valleys of sighs to bring the ease of existence and acceptance of ourselves. It is a reflection of ourselves through every verse and every sound that is born and transformed. Catharsis and metamorphosis of the divine in us which is a grain of light of the universe. Such astral music both arises and is in me and around me in that microworld of mine.
Although you are known for sevdah and your original music relies on this musical direction, in the song “Mehmed-aga” I also recognize Byzantine musical motifs somewhere through the music. Do we have these motifs in our folk songs and how many of them?
Very much so because it is an inseparable whole with our tradition and intangible cultural heritage and customs. It is the seed of spirituality sown in us centuries ago and we perceive it as our code and characteristic and as such it becomes part of our recognition and creation of music in the past and the moment we live in now.
The Byzantine influence is too strong a character and the emerging sevdalinka, together with Sephardic melodies, choruses and ballad tragedies, encompass precisely such a synthesis that celebrates and recognizes God as love and at the same time becomes a harmonization in a world of cacophony, noise and discord and the omnipresence that deafens our senses in the world we live in and are surrounded by.
Many contemporary musicians combine sevdah with electronic music, jazz, and other musical styles. You yourself have shown through your work that it is adaptable, and that it is easy to play with. But you always somehow return to that basic sound of sevdah. Although it is possible to stray too far from the essence of sevdah through contemporary elements, this has not happened to you so far, but how difficult is it to recognize when enough is enough, otherwise that line will be crossed?
The measure is a state of maturation and knowledge, both towards art and towards people, the measure in giving and expressing is the wisdom of creation and the boldness of creating, art as such and artists in general.
The only thing I can exaggerate is in giving and giving importance to that love, but that's why my sadness is there, filling all those cracks and leaving only one unhealed and painless wound so that the light can shine through it even more brightly and be a guide for my soul and all other souls where that safe shore is in that stormy sea.
You went a step further a long time ago, daring to write songs modeled after sevdalinka. Often, these love stories were your inspiration. And no matter how different the cultures from which people come are, somehow these love stories are always something that binds people together because we all love, cherish, suffer... (at least we once did). Love is a universal story and you yourself have emphasized many times that love is your guiding principle and eternal inspiration. Have you ever regretted exposing yourself so much through your creativity, because this world can be very cruel today?
The world is cruel, but there is also so much love that it always reminds me who I am, what I am made of, and to whom I belong. It is always a return to God who knows everything we think and do and say. He knows exactly how much we are worth and what our soul is like. And He gives to us according to that merit.
My creativity is not mine even at the moment I create it, it all belongs only to him, the Almighty, and I am only ever an instrument in his hands to heal the souls of others with that song and remind them of how much love they themselves can be. Every song of mine is an inexhaustible gratitude to God, and everything that just pours out is an eternal source for us too.
Bonus video:
