estás en mi lista de promesas a olvidar: On a car ride in the summer of 2013, I mentioned working on this song to my Spanish ex sister-in-law, asking her whether she knew it. She wasn’t sure about this particular song, but remembered the band as one from her teenage years, “from that age when you suffer a lot, and nobody in the world understands you”. This surprised me in two ways: First, that she knew the band but not the song, since I had always somehow assumed that it was the their greatest hit (maybe from seeing it referenced on an online Latin rock forum). Second, I was surprised about the way she situated the band: I came across this song on internet radio, never heard many of their other songs, and so I did not have any reference, other than the music itself, as to what kind of band this was. Yet after watching the music video and listening to the lyrics more closely, I do understand where she comes from.
There are a handful of bands whose every song I know exactly because they were among my favorites at some point, but I also arrange and play songs by bands which I then only start to learn about as I practise: this is one of them. I cannot recall the title of a single other Héroes del Silencio track. Yet, this song popped up on the internet radio, presumably a Pandora station with a few Los Fabulosos Cadillacs tracks on the list, somehow caught my attention soon and became a favorite. It must have been the chorus that hooked me, and despite the many times I have listened to the song while transcribing it, it still is the chorus that gets me.
The song starts with an acoustic riff accompanied by what seem to be a subdued tabla beat and an occasional sitar strum, possibly a guitar with a sitar effect (the complete version has a short intro with the same “sitar” sound), adding a slight “Indian” flavor; this continues the tradition of hard rock bands who with disarming ingenuity appropriated something ethnic, long before questions of authenticity came into play. (Hint: The musical traditions of India do in fact not sound much like Héroes del Silencio at all). The rest of the band enters during the first chorus, at this point still without vocals, and afterwards verse and chorus repeat until the end, interspersed with a musically different interlude and outro. After transcribing the whole song, arranging it for piano did not pose any major difficulties except for the tabla beat. Especially during the intro and the first verse, the tabla is the only addition to the musical texture besides the guitar riff. Since there is no way of playing a tabla beat on the piano, I determined that, in my impression, what the beat mainly did was add accents on every second and fourth beat, and I decided to include these accents in the form of bass notes in the first and third verse (the tabla beat seems to rest during the second verse).
What is the deal with the chorus and its lyrics? The lyrics to most of the song can be said to be an effort at evocative imagery, or at least that is the way they seem to be intended. In fact, for most of the lyrics I could not say that knowing them has improved my experience of this song. While the images are evocative, they are not developed enough, but rather too disjointed and superficially dramatic to have any serious emotional impact. “In a coffin I preserve your touch, together with a crown of your shaggy hair, wanting to find an infinite rainbow” seems like gibberish somewhere at the intersection of where hippie meets goth. Although Héroes del Silencio fans won’t like me saying this, having Enrique Bunbury’s trademark but undeniably affected voice sing these particular lines does not exactly make it more convincing either. Fortunately, as the song continues, there are fragments here and there which seem much more heartfelt and authentic, first and foremost the chorus; although “I cannot distinguish between kisses and roots” seems like more of the previous hippie nonsense, the rest of the chorus comes closer to a stroke of genius: “I cannot distinguish the complicated from the simple/And now you are on my list of promises to forget/Anything bursts into flames when the proper spark is applied to it.” Now we are talking about something that speaks to the universal experience of the human condition. While a “list of promises to forget” seems pedantic, it is here used as a powerful image that gets across the intended meaning of “suffering because of the inability to forget a sentimental interest”. The connection to the following line is not entirely unambiguous, but it seems to relate to the speaker; unlikely though it may have seemed, it is him who has burst into flames, such was the nature of the spark that was applied to him. Funny as these lines might sound to some, especially when translated into English, they actually amount to a heartbreaking story as old as mankind; it is no accident that this story is sung over and over again since time immemorial.
Another musical highlight of the song coincides with what appears to me as the single most irritating and vaguely disgusting line of the song; I can’t seem to think of a context in which “white sperm running down the spinal column” would not be undesirable and out of place. However, in another stroke of genius, the line coincides with a subtle change of the bass note (replacing the root note with the third) that creates a downward stepwise motion, and in this particular place has an inexplicably powerful effect. In my experience, the resulting dramatic urgency strangely redeems the oddness of the line, as if endowing it with the notion of a deeper meaning that remains inaccessible to me; a truly unique effect of the combination of words/melody with the harmonic skeleton.
Ultimately, it is the video that most expressly proves correct the somewhat flippant statement from above, in that it has hippie written all over it, what with the Jim Morrison moves etc. Is that a problem? It technically isn’t, except for the fact that things hippie slightly bother me; in spite of a range of achievements and influence on the development of public thought and mores that the first hippie generation has to be given credit for, at this time and from where I stand, I have come to associate hippies with an irritating ingenuity (for their clear concept of the enemy), an amount of leisure reserved to upper class kids, and a degree of dogmatism that I am suspicious of in any context. Héroes del Silencio hardly belong to the first generation of hippie thought; still a good song.
