At the beginning of his video for “No Es Culpa Mía,” Pink Pablo traipses into frame, pours a beer over his head, takes off his shirt, kicks a keyboard off its stand, knocks over a rack of clothes, and starts screaming into a mic. What you might not know is that you’re watching someone with a master’s in neuroscience practicing what he’s learned.
Pink Pablo, whose real name is Juan Pablo Rivera, has been making music on and off for more than four years now. But it’s only in the last year or so that his name has begun to take off. Last week, he released his debut EP, road 2 neverland, which is the first of a two-part series that he intends to finish dropping between now and early next year.
His sound is an amalgamation of pop, rock, and urbano; as if “Yo Visto Así” from Bad Bunny’s El Último Tour del Mundo album wasn’t a one-off but a signature style. It’s the result of growing up in Puerto Rico in a family of musicians — his father, uncles, cousins, and two siblings play various instruments — and being “obsessed with every genre“ during his adolescent years, citing examples like Green Day and My Chemical Romance to Fania and Willie Colón.
Making music that can’t be pinned down is both Pablo’s philosophy — and also something that comes so naturally to him, he doesn’t always think about it too much. “What sounds good in the moment? If this reminds me of, I don’t know, Led Zeppelin? Well, perfect. Reminds me of Arcángel? Better yet. I feel like when you draw from so many influences, you start to even forget who’s the influence,” he tells Rolling Stone. “You don’t even know where it’s coming from. It could be coming from Frank Ocean, it could be coming from Frank Zappa.”
EMBED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=npKmR032mok
Starting road 2 neverland happened after, as he puts it, “cutting off the umbilical cord” from Puerto Rico and his family. “My sister’s a doctor, and my brother’s a lawyer. And my mother, she was really adamant that we should get our degrees. And I took the weird decision of studying clinical psychology,” he explains. “You really have to go the full way in clinical psychology, because [otherwise] you can’t do anything with it. If you don’t have a PhD, you can’t really do anything with it apart from research, being in a lab and being in a spreadsheet.”
Pablo spent two years in New York City working towards his PhD, but couldn’t shake doubts and wondered if this was truly what he wanted to do. The weight of spending the majority of his 20s pursuing a career he was unsure about made him uneasy.
A voracious reader, Pablo came across a quote one day that tilted his life in a radically new direction. “It was, ‘When you don’t know what you want to do with your life, what have you never stopped doing? What’s something you’ve always done without mattering if you’re getting paid for it or not?’ It was definitely the music. Hands down, it was music, music production, composition, singing, just playing instruments,” he remembers. “So I was like, ‘This is probably my vocation.’ I just stopped running away from it.”
After dropping out of school, he moved to L.A., where he enrolled in some camps for budding artists. He began to work in earnest on his music, divorced from any expectations. During that period, he produced and recorded the bulk of road 2 neverland, which reflects the stories of his time in Los Angeles, both good and bad: “When I’m with you I’m the person I want to be,” he croons on “Veo Luces.” “I’d rather kill myself than fall in love again,” he sings in “Perdimos el Control,” the very next track.
“It’s a rebelliousness against the expectations,” he says. “Sometimes that rebelliousness leads to bad habits or just delving too much into relationships or just trying to be very reactive. So [road 2 neverland] is just ‘I’m living life. I’m having fun.’” A few songs chronicle situations before he moved to Los Angeles: On “No Es Culpa Mia,” he growls “Por mis tatuajes dicen que ando con el diablo.” It’s a reference to his grandfather, who was horrified after Pablo got his first tattoo. He told Pablo that Satan would go into his body through it, and so he would have to pray twice as much to ward off the demons.
As irreverent and impudent he comes across in the tracks, he views the music as something “necessary” that he had to get out of his system; a process he refers to as “unknotting” his feelings and thoughts. This is where his education bleeds into his art. “Songs are beautiful. They’re aesthetically beautiful, and it’s just a beautiful way of just pouring your heart out,” he says. “It’s like a really beautiful conversation you’re having with yourself, at the end of the day.”
The second volume of road 2 neverland is still a few months away. He sees it as a sequel to the first one, in ways both sonic and existential. He recorded it in Virginia while holed up at his older sister’s house, spending nights in a solitary room recording and producing by himself after a rough breakup. “I was hurting a lot,” he says. “The second EP is like you’re peeking into a conversation that I’m having with myself about what’s going on in my head.” He teases the second project on this EP: The opening track, “Neverland,” was meant for the follow-up but he moved it, envisioning the structure like a film that opens with the present day and then rewinds through the past to get everyone up to speed.
As he wades into the next phase of his career, he’s leaning into the leaps of faith that have brought him here. Right now, he’s trying to reconcile his brash artistic persona with his somewhat holistic approach to the music itself. When talking about how he’s navigated performance anxiety during his first live presentations, he shares something that could easily be applied to his whole career “It’s all about saying yes to the present. It’s all about not evaluating every move you make. It’s all about trusting that there’s an intelligence that will pour out if you just let it.” His songs sound chaotic, but that’s because a pent-up release is often that. “If you can bask in that chaos, then it’s not going to be stressful. It’s going to be euphoric — energetic.”
