Rene Lopez is a multitalented singer-songwriter, guitarist and drummer who has been on the music scene for many years and has created a consistently stellar body of work that steadfastly charts an independent path reflective of the multicultural New York City environment where he was raised and lives to this day. The timbales and guitar-playing Rene is the son of René López, Sr., renowned Puerto Rican salsa musician and trumpet player who left his mark with Ray Barretto and Típica ’73, and those roots are an integral part of who Rene Jr. is as a musician, though they have not always manifested themselves as clearly as they do now. Today, Rene says, he is “fully embracing the gifts my father passed down to me and hopefully I can do something fresh with incorporating my other musical influences like soul, jazz, funk and rock.” You can definitely hear it all in Rene’s most recent work. Bringing back the Latin instruments like Cuban tres (a guitar with three sets of double strings), timbales, congas, cowbell, baby bass, flute and trumpet as well as the melodies, rhythms and arrangements of the salsa boom he first heard as a kid listening to his father on stage, the radio or on records at home, is a big part of where his new sound is going. As Lopez simply and succinctly puts it, “It just feels so right to incorporate my roots into my songs.”

Lopez has released the toe-tapping “Flamingo,” a Caribbean rooted single with the Cuban son montuno and cha-cha-chá rubbing hips with Jamaican ska rhythms. Lopez has noted that the single was written about a person he fell deeply in love after he got divorced. “She was the most special woman I ever met and it was amazing being together,” but because of where they both were in their lives (he was much older and already had kids and she was young ready to start a family), he new he had to let her go. This experience was “extremely difficult and heartbreaking,” Lopez says, but he wanted her to be happy so the relationship ended before too much damage could be done. The song however dates from the initial period of infatuation, when Lopez first met her, as he was inspired to create a tribute to the “beautiful flamingo” who “brought me so much happiness when I was down in the dumps.”

The flamingo is a reality-defying bird that is at once graceful and outlandish and is the perfect metaphor for the object of his ultimately unattainable love, adding to the sense of doomed romance born out by the incompatibility of the couple’s circumstances that ended the relationship. The song is full of yearning for love and healing, where the singer confesses, “I’m the diamond in the ruff, If you help shine me up, I’ll sing the prettiest lullaby, Rock you through the night.” There’s a certain fantastical flight of romantic fantasy that lends a wistful, dreamlike quality to the song when Lopez croons, “Even though I can’t fly, I’ll build you a mystic ship, Sail and watch the stars dance, Along my finger tips,” and this overtly romantic, poetic vibe also keys crucially into another Latin musical sensibility that Lopez taps into so well, namely the classic traditions of the bolero, balada and canción (as well as salsa romántica) that come from the heart as much as the head, feet and hips.