Leroy Sánchez is one of the composers of ‘SloMo’. His career took off when a producer saw him singing on YouTube ten years ago.
Until now, only Manuel Alejandro, a composer among composers, had managed to walk around with a song in his own handwriting in two consecutive editions of Eurovision. He did it in 1966 and 1967, with Raphael at the microphone. But this honor will no longer be yours. Leroy Sánchez from Vitoria repeats this Saturday at the festival with the song ‘SloMo’ – last year he signed ‘Voy a querme’ for Blas Cantó – created ten hands between himself, Ibere Fortes, Keith Harris, Maggie Szabo and Arjen Thonen. “In 2021 I had nothing to do with the candidacy, my involvement ended when I made the song, but this time it went very differently. I have been involved from the selection of the singer to the artistic production,” compares the young man, who settled in the United States ten years ago, during the hectic countdown to the Eurovision final in Turin.
The “roller coaster” this 30-something has traveled since ‘SloMo’ won the Benidorm Fest actually started spinning when he was a kid. “Ever since I was very little, I was fascinated by music,” says Leroy. He loved ‘Lluvia de estrellas’, the mythical program where anonymous people waste their voices, characterized as their idols, and he will never forget the impact of ‘Joyful, joyful’ played by Lauryn Hill in the movie ‘Sister Act 2’. “Wow,” he blurts out, remembering that memory. Mariola, one of the music teachers of the Vitoriano, already warned her parents that the child “had an ear”, but she, a cleaner and a carpenter, could not attend any studies at the conservatory. However, the boy tied himself to his passion with the strings of a guitar lying around the house and fanned it in a “self-taught” version.
Leroy went through the school choir, started writing songs, then tried to sing them in his room… “I was bitten by the bug to know what other people would think of what I was singing,” he admits. The repercussions were “not immediate”, although his “cover” of Beyoncé, Justin Bieber or Adele eventually became a hit. Today he has 4.4 million subscribers to his channel, more than 850,000 followers on Instagram, about 111,000 on Twitter… His career exploded in 2010 when an American producer discovered him on the internet and a year later he moved to Florida.
He now lives in Los Angeles, where he loves to “sweat” at the gym, go to the movies or sink his teeth into new foods.
In his personal archive he has three EPs to his name and composed songs for Pitbull or NFK -Marc Anthony, Malú or Jennifer Lopez – they also sang their songs in the studio – and on his suitcase are stickers of the airports on which he travels halfway around the world from Vitoria, where Dato once played with his guitar on Calle Dato, to Australia. And without amulets or superstitions, though, he confesses, «now that I enter the stage with the right foot, it is something I took from Chanel».
Source: La Verdad
I’m Wayne Wickman, a professional journalist and author for Today Times Live. My specialty is covering global news and current events, offering readers a unique perspective on the world’s most pressing issues. I’m passionate about storytelling and helping people stay informed on the goings-on of our planet.
