Going It Alone

"For me it's a crowning achievement,” the New Mexico-born, blind since birth Raul Midón, explains. “For me, it doesn't matter what happens in the marketplace – this is a record that came out of a sense of my own desire, my own need to actually get this done. It wasn't a deadline-inspired record; it wasn't done because of a contract. When you make your own record, it's all you. I don't know if I would ever do it again, to tell you the truth,” he chuckles.

Midón had already had a successful career as a backing singer and musician working behind a number of major Latin American artists, among them Ricky Martin, Julio Iglesias and Shakira, but by 1998, he'd decided he wanted to establish a solo career and left Miami, where he'd gone to study jazz at the university.

“I went to New York really to boost my career – that's probably why most people go! I didn't want to be a local musician anymore. I was a musician before I was a songwriter – I was a musician and then I realised I wanted to write songs in my 20s.”

Though he quickly found himself at the bottom of the heap in the Big Apple, he managed to get into more session work while developing his playing technique in a West Village club.

“It came out of a sense of wanting to do things that I didn't hear other people doing. It came out of wanting to add that percussive element to the guitar and also create an orchestral sound with the guitar, instead of just keeping the guitar an instrument that you strum or that you make chords or that you do leads or solos, but to think of it also as an orchestral instrument and an instrument to arrange with.”

In 2003 Midón play Carnegie Hall in a tribute to the movie music of Spike Lee, and was approached by producer Arif Mardin who signed him to his Manhattan Records, then co-produced State Of Mind, the album that put Midón on the international map. A second Manhattan album, A World Within A World, produced by Arif's son Joe, followed in 2007, then 2009's Synthesis and most recently, last year's live album, Invisible Chains Live From NYC. All of which has put him in the enviable position of independent artist recording in his home studio for the first time.

“It's a completely different process and I got some amazing people to help me with it, just people that believed in what I was doing and wanted to work with me. So I got [singer] Dianne Reeves on the record, I wrote a song with Bill Withers that's on the record, I got [jazz bass player] Marcus Miller to play on a song, [R&B singer] Lizz Wright is on the record, [New York-based Cameroonian jazz bassist] Richard Bona's on the record.”