"I'm receiving so much support that I didn't expect at all. It's very gratifying to see that people are enjoying it, and the messages from people saying such positive things make me incredibly happy. I really didn't expect it," she says. María is an Art History student at the University of Zaragoza, and her story with music began when she was ten. A decade later, the young woman has composed more than 60 songs and released her first album on streaming platforms ("Masterplan").
"I've loved music since I was very young because my parents, especially my mother, played a lot of music for me. I started playing the Spanish guitar when I was ten, but I didn't like it at all and gave it up. At 15, I started playing electric guitar because I'm a huge Status Quo fan and wanted to be like them. Then, in 2021, I started writing songs with an acoustic guitar," María says.
All the songs she refers to are in English. All of them except for "Algo de interés," which is already going viral on social media. Paradoxically, she says, it is the song that was hardest for her to compose and write. "It's the song that gave me the most headaches because I composed it at the end of May and didn't finish it until mid-August. When I write a song, I do it in a single day, and it was very difficult to make everything fit—the lyrics, the chords... I knew it had to be in Spanish," the singer admits.
With verses inspired by one of her favorite films, "A Madman on the Loose," and Erik Satie, Robbie Williams, The Beatles and Bon Jovi as her main musical references—although her work is radically different from theirs—María Bonilla has accompanied her new song with a music video filmed in her native Zaragoza. It was shot at the Water and Environment Documentary Center (on Paseo Echegaray) and at Matisse café. In fact, Henri Matisse himself travels to the future and appears in black and white within the story.
As she seeks to make a name for herself in the Aragonese and Spanish music scenes, the young singer will perform a concert on November 28 at the Creedence venue, after already playing several shows at other venues in Zaragoza and Madrid.
