‘I didn’t dance until I was 45’: how Jorge Drexler went from repressed doctor to rump-shaking Oscar-winner

How did a Uruguayan medic who grew up under an anti-music dictatorship win a best song Academy award? As he looks set to scoop up more prizes at the Latin Grammys, we meet the extraordinary Jorge Drexler

It makes sense that a Uruguayan doctor turned singer would write a song that begins: “Long live science! Long live poetry!” Guitar y Vos (Guitar and You) is also the first track that Jorge Drexler performs this afternoon at a music industry event in the basement of Madrid’s Movistar arena. The second is El Otro Lado del Rio (The Other Side of the River), which he composed for the Che Guevara road movie The Motorcycle Diaries. Drexler was still largely unknown when it won the best original song Oscar in 2005, so was not invited to perform at the ceremony. In a classy act of defiance, he delivered a short a cappella version in lieu of an acceptance speech.

That’s how he sings it today too, solo under a spotlight on the stairs, before joining his band on stage. Backed by three drummers playing in the Afro-Uruguayan candombe style, Drexler turns a corporate lunchtime gig into a midnight block party. From his latest album Taracá – nominated for eight Latin Grammys at the forthcoming awards on 12 November – comes Ante la Duda, Baila (When in Doubt, Dance). While his lyrics list Spanish kings and colonial governments who have banned various forms of dancing over the centuries, the singer duly shakes his ass and moves us to do the same.

“I grew up in a society that didn’t dance,” Drexler tells me later, across town in the timber-beamed apartment that serves as his studio. Now 62, handsomely grey-bearded and youthfully dressed in very loose jeans with very big cuffs, he has lived more than half his life in Madrid. Born and raised in Montevideo, he spent his formative years under a civic-military dictatorship that was actively hostile to musicians, artists and liberal-intellectual families like his own.

“Dictatorships end, but their effects don’t leave your body so easily. It took decades to shake them out of my joints by making a record called Bailar en la Cueva [Dancing in the Cave]. You could say I didn’t dance until I was 45.” Drexler started out as a moonlighter, writing and performing at night while studying medicine, and paying for his own first recordings with what little he earned in clinical practice.

Fellow musicians treated him as a hobbyist, he says, and fellow doctors as a weirdo with an earring. “Working in a hospital, I hid my guitar under my white coat. Playing in a bar, I hid my white coat in my guitar case.” As an ear, nose and throat specialist, did he find himself especially sensitive to the acoustic effects of striking certain chords? “Well, I know my frequencies,” he says. “At a show I’ll tell the engineer, ‘Bring it down 250 hertz.’” He was already in his 30s when Spanish musician Joaquín Sabina invited him to play in Madrid, where he soon met his first wife, and stayed to make his way as a singer-songwriter, or cantautor – a venerable tradition in Spain but somewhat restrictive.

Coming from a background of Uruguayan rock, pop and candombe, he found that niche a bad fit, and sales-wise his early albums were “complete failures”. Something felt off until he tried to reconcile his romantic or poetic impulses with his scientific interests. Instead of singing about life in the strictly personal sense, he broadened his scope to the cosmic, and the biological.

“Life is also a molecule passing through a membrane,” he says. A song fittingly titled Todo Se Transforma (Everything Changes), and based on Antoine Lavoisier’s Law of the Conservation of Mass, was his first to “fully resonate”. “It was also my first to be anything like a hit.” He’s had many hits since, with songs about the prehistory of human migration (Movimiento), or the origins of love on a cellular level (El Plan Maestro). Both of those won Latin Grammys too.

The new album Taracá is a belated return to the candombe sound of his homeland, partly inspired by the recent death of his father, who escaped Nazi Germany with his family as a child. “So his life had a horrible start, but a beautiful ending,” says Drexler. The record also features an ensemble cast of Latin American players, from 74-year-old classical guitarist Julio Cobelli to Puerto Rican rapper Young Miko. In Drexler’s view, this may be the most important time in history for Spanish-language music, with stars such as Bad Bunny smashing down the gateway to the wider world by way of the US.

“The US is a bilingual country now. That’s what scares the Trump administration, and that’s why ICE exists, but I think it’s too late for them to stop it.” Spanish is tricky to write songs in, he admits, having helped Colombian megastar Shakira (“A genius”) to translate some of hers. “You guys have all these amazing monosyllabic words like bricks to build with,” he says of English speakers. “We don’t have so many. I mean, Can’t Buy Me Love sounds a lot neater than No Puedes Comprarme el Amor, no?” Drexler is still much better known in one language than the other, but he has learned that such concerns only get in the way of songwriting, which is already difficult enough.

A scholar of the craft as much as a practitioner, he will casually draw on Spinoza or Homer while talking about it. “The Odyssey was not a book, it was a very long song,” he says. And from the fabulist writer Italo Calvino he got the idea that the myth of the Medusa makes a useful metaphor for fame: “Look the monster in the eye and you will turn to stone.” He keeps his prizes in a closed cabinet in the corner, and tries never to open it. “The word for success is éxito in Spanish,” he says, “derived from the Latin exitus.

“It means ‘the way out’. In medicine, it’s our code for death. ‘This patient is going to exitus.’ And so, to me, success means the end of the process. But I love this process, and I’m not ready for the way out.”