Xô Torres I carry the name Torres with me with gratitude and responsibility

I am João Torres. I was born in Coimbra, a city of ancient riverbanks and eternal corners, where the stones still whisper stories and the rivers carry memories. My name carries a distant but powerful echo — that of master António Torres, a 19th-century Spanish luthier, creator of the Torres guitar, who shaped the basis of the instrument we know today as the classical guitar. They say we are distant relatives. I prefer to believe that we are connected by an invisible thread of soul and intention.

Mr. Antonio Torres did not want to just build guitars: he wanted to sculpt emotions. He introduced seven harmonic crossbars into the top of his guitar, changing its body so that the resonance would be lower, deeper — so that the guitar would cry with dignity. His mission was clear: to create an instrument that would bring out melancholy, that noble emotion that is not sadness, but felt memory and beauty in its raw state.

This melancholy — this ancestral longing — also pulses in my hands when I play.

My relationship with the guitar began unexpectedly, at a time of loss, pain and hope. For me, the guitar was medicine and a bridge: it served as a source of comfort, reconstruction, a connection with my brother, with my childhood, with the soul of the world. I taught and was taught. And since then, I have never let go of the sound.

Today, my art is born from the desire to rescue what is ours. Portuguese popular music — from Zeca Afonso to Adriano Correia de Oliveira — is the backbone of my musical expression. I bring these songs to the fingerstyle universe, where a single guitar tells everything: the melody, the rhythm, the harmony and the silence between the notes.

But I also went deeper.

I went to meet the drum of the Earth, the song of the forest, the ancestral wisdom that lives within us, and that reveals itself when we stop playing just to listen. In ceremonies, in circles, in moments of sharing with nature and other human beings, I understood that music is not just art. It is medicine.

That’s why I tune my guitar lower, more earthly, closer to the sound of the womb and the cave. That’s why I call this sound harmonic melancholy — a song from the past that wants to heal the present. That’s why I give each note to the universe, like an offering. And then I stay silent, ready to receive whatever comes.

My guitar is not just wood and strings. It’s an altar. And each show, each sharing, is a ritual.

I carry the name Torres with me with gratitude and responsibility. The guitar I play — and that I build with my own tuning and intention — is the continuation of a lineage of listening and surrender. And my greatest wish is that each person who hears me play feels, even if only for a moment, that they belong to something greater. Something that was here before we were born and will continue after we’re gone.

That something… is music.

And music… is home