On why I write my lyrics in English
Not all of them, but most. Guilty as charged. Many a time I've been asked why, being a Spanish native speaker, I choose to write in another language. It's a fair enough question, specially when the person asking seems disappointed in the fact that they can't understand what I'm singing about. It breaks my heart. As caring for lyrics doesn't seem to be a trend in the general public, I hate to lose one of the few who care because of a language barrier. This blog, to an extent, is a justification, a way to redeem myself.
It happened from the start. My first lyrics date from my teen years, probably scribbled during class on some random notebook while being held hostage by my wildest fantasies about big stages, roaring crowds and golden spotlights. They were written in a bold but spotty English. At that time making music was mostly an exercise of imitation for me. I learned how to sing by singing as faithfully as possible on top of my favorite vocalists, David Coverdale, Joey Tempest, Bruce Dickinson, Jon Bon Jovi and such (from Whitesnake, Europe, Iron Maiden and Bon Jovi respectively. I guess you get the picture of what my early musical influences are all about... they're all about the hair, of course!). In the same way, I learned how to write lyrics by stealing chunks of language from songs that spoke to me and recycling them for my own purposes. I wish I could find one of those notebooks now, there must be some true gems in there, for a good laugh that is...
My English improved and so did the lyrics, and this takes me to my second argument: my love affair with the English language. It was love at first sight, the same as with music, only it probably happened a little later. As I needed to sing those songs I liked, I needed to learn the words, and to achieve that I needed to understand the words. Memorizing a meaningless string of syllables was out of the question, so, there I was, a seven-year-old little girl with the lyrics of a record and a big fat English-Spanish dictionary on the desk, little feet dangling several inches above the ground. Vinyl records, by the way, but you had to be in luck, as some of them didn't include lyrics... that felt like a tragedy at the time. As I cracked open the mysteries that those unfamiliar sequences of letters contained, I fell deeper and deeper in love with them, and then there was no turning back, music and the English language went hand in hand from then on.
That doesn't mean I can't write in Spanish. I tried translating my songs in an attempt to make my music more user-friendly in my own land, a necessity that was pointed out to me by several people in various occasions. I didn't like the result. Then I forced myself to write from scratch in Spanish, and that was much better: Nocturna, No hay más, Bandera pirata, Bicho malo... I can do it, but I have to feel that the song wants to be sung in Spanish, it's the song's choice, not mine, and it requires breaking the habit of writing in English.
So, that's my confession, this is why. I'm a victim of my musical taste and my language inclinations. Lastly, as much as I don't consider myself a creature of habit, I guess in this particular case I am.
Spanish... English... there's a third contender now: Chinese. I finished my first Chinese lyrics just a couple of weeks ago. But that's a different story, I'll leave that for another day.