Juan Wauters
There’s freedom to be found in consistency. Until recently, Juan Wauters may not have agreed with this statement. As a touring musician and multinational citizen, transience had always come naturally to him. Circumstance, however, recently prompted him to reconsider the benefits of staying in one place: “During COVID I discovered / that I like stability,” he muses on the title track of his new album, “but the world still sees me / as a wandering rebel.” His most introspective work to date, Wauters’ sixth solo album Wandering Rebel finds the artist taking stock of how he’s changed, how the world sees him, and what he wants out of life.
From his early days as a founding member of Queens-based garage act The Beets to his impressive solo career, Wauters has spent the better part of the last decade on the road. When he wasn’t touring or recording, he was gathering material, traversing Latin America to write his 2019 Spanish-language opus La Onda de Juan Pablo, then heading North to collaborate with friends like Mac DeMarco, Homeshake, Nick Hakim and more for 2021’s boisterous Real Life Situations. Apart from intermissions in his home base of Jackson Heights, Queens, Wauters has been notoriously hard to pin down.
