JOAQUIN SABINA (SPAIN)

Joaquin Sabina plays a narrow-body, steel-string Alhambra guitar, specially built for him by our luthier Javier Mengual in January 2025.

Joaquín Sabina is the singer and poet whose figure has transcended the category of popular myth thanks to an artistic work that has universalized the irreverent and passionately beautiful vision of life through its treacherous nocturnality, feverish love, and unmitigated heartbreak. Verses and stanzas that smack of shameless sincerity and scratch at utopias and freedoms have made him an indispensable figure in contemporary music and street poetry in Spanish.

A master of the sung story, an incorrigible bon vivant, a rocker at heart, and a singer-songwriter by trade, Joaquín Ramón Martínez Sabina was born in Úbeda (Jaén, Spain) in 1949. He was a voracious reader from his adolescence, when he wrote his first poems and participated in a fledgling rock group. During his university years, he took part in the student movement against the regime, a period that culminated in his self-imposed exile in London, where he would write his first songs, until his return to Spain in 1977.

Settled in Madrid as an unrepentant urbanite, he alternates the release of his first solo albums with performances at La Mandragora (with Javier Krahe and Alberto Pérez) and composing songs for other artists. Since then, he has released seventeen studio albums, several of them essential chapters in the history of popular music in Spanish, such as Juez y parte (85), Física y química (92), 19 días y 500 noches (99) or Vinagre y rosas (09), and among which his work done together with Fito Páez and Joan Manuel Serrat also stands out. Added to this capital discography are seven live albums and an audiobook of recited poems that, together with different compilations, have accumulated more than ten million physical albums sold throughout his career and more than two billion audio streams .

Since the mid-eighties, having become an artist of immense popularity and drawing power, he has undertaken countless tours that have passed through almost every American country, including the most prestigious venues and festivals such as the National Auditorium in Mexico, the Luna Park in Buenos Aires, and the Chilean Viña del Mar, among many others. He has also appeared in legendary European venues such as the Royal Albert Hall in London and the Olympia in Paris.

At the same time, Joaquín Sabina has developed a literary career that began with the songbook, paid for out of his own pocket, Memoria del exilio (76), followed a decade later by De lo cantado y sus margens, in a phase that concludes with the compilation of his songs Con buena letra (originally from 2002 and expanded twice). On a purely poetic level, it is worth highlighting the book of sonnets Ciento vuela de catorce (01), published in the Visor de Poesía collection and which was a milestone in the publication of poetry in Spanish due to its great readership, as well as the three compilations of verses that have appeared in publications in which he has collaborated: Interviú, Público and more recently Tinta Libre, from which the following respectively resulted Esta boca es mía (05), El grito en el suelo (12) and En román paladino (18) . His bibliography is completed with the correspondence A vuelta de correo (07), which includes letters to personalities such as the insurgent Subcomandante Marcos and the poet José Hierro, and two miscellanies containing drawings and unfinished fragments of poems and songs: Muy personal (13) and Garagatos (16), a collector's book published by Artika in a limited edition. On the other hand, dozens of biographies of his life have been published, as well as multiple studies on his poetic and musical work.

At the end of 2017, he released his latest studio album , Lo niego todo , and in 2020, he launched his No hay dos sin tres tour with Serrat, which was cut short after Joaquín fell from the stage at the Wizink Center in Madrid. That same year, the audiovisual series Pongamos que hablo de Joaquín Sabina was broadcast.

He is currently preparing his farewell album and tour and is releasing Sintándole mucho , a documentary film shot over 13 years and directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, which is a “portrait without a bowler hat, taken just a few centimetres from his skin, which tells, without any mitigation, the intimacy of the artist, his backstage, when he comes off stage.”

His professional career has been recognized with numerous awards and distinctions, including the Silver Medal of Andalusia, the Gold Medal for Merit in the Fine Arts, the Gold Medal of the City of Madrid, the Guest of Honor of the City of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, three Ondas Awards, and the Latin Grammy Award for Musical Excellence. However, with his unique sense of humor, he claims to prefer the many bars named after one of his songs, both in Spain and Latin America.

Cured of fears due to old age and the devil, his two recognized passions are the Spanish language and the rich and varied ways of speaking it in Latin America.

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At Alhambra Guitarras we have collaborated over the last few years with other guitars for Joaquín Sabina

In 2024, we also built a guitar especially for Joaquín, with all the details to make it authentic like him. If you'd like to read more about this guitar, here's a link to the blog.