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. 

The lack of touring in the years following the 2020 pandemic lockdown, however, brought Wauters’ wayfaring lifestyle to a screeching halt. After spending the majority of the year at home in New York, he relocated to Montevideo, Uruguay at the end of 2020, prior to the release of Real Life Situations. It would be another year before he’d be able to tour again, and over the course of that year, he embarked on voyages to LA and New York, with the aim of recording full albums in each city. Though many of the songs from these sessions did make it onto Wandering Rebel, the final product is, like Wauters himself, impossible to attribute to just one place. And each time he returned to Montevideo from these sojourns, he realized the unexpected had happened–he’d put down roots. His short-term stay had become a long-term relocation, and a casual romance had turned into a serious partnership. “If touring never came back,” Wauters reflects now, “I would have been at peace [with it]. New York was the place I always came back to, but I never really had a ‘home.’ My parents left Uruguay, their home, when I was young. Now, [in Montevideo], I have a place to come home to, and people that are waiting for me.” 

Written mostly during this extended break from touring, the songs on Wandering Rebel are candid reflections on subjects like career (“Wandering Rebel”), romantic commitment (“Amor Amor”), mental health (“Nube Negra”) and the personal toll of touring (“Let Loose”). Wauters’ lyrics have always had a refreshing sincerity, but he seems to be at his most open on this record. “I’m looking to have a family,” he states on “Wandering Rebel,” “so if this music thing not pick up / we’ll have to make some changes up in here.”