By José Gandue @Gandour
And yes, they're all acoustic instruments. You could even say, in any tone you can imagine, that this is music that could be made in a big city. or in a town of barely one hundred thousand inhabitants called Coatepec, a little over a thousand meters above sea level, in the Mexican state of Veracruz. «"It's a very traditional sound,", A friend tells me as soon as I show him the first song, More or less before, from the album Withers, belonging to Silvana Estrada. Yes, today we hear a collection of eleven tunes that, technologically speaking, could have been recorded at any second of the last seventy years anywhere in the world., But it arrives with hurricane force in these times, from the hands and voice of a girl barely a quarter of a century old, that manages to break the heart in a fair and necessary way, confirming that fragility is a quality that relieves if it is confirmed at the right moment.
Is «"traditional music"», But, to record Withers, I suspect that the matter It wasn't simply a matter of putting the microphones in the right places and hoping that Estrada would feel in the right mood to start recording his compositions. There has to be a special atmosphere for the singer to say (and meanwhile delicately plunge her dagger into our right ventricle) those devastating lines from her most popular song, Letter:
And that may be true
And one day I will leave too.
That love doesn't last a century
And the river doesn't flow backwards.
And they might be wrong
And let fear play tricks on us.
And to save us pain
The wind leaves us behind.
Silvana Estrada embodies not only a significant part of Mexican folklore: One can feel the nostalgia for melancholic music from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. The beautiful bitterness of Lisbon fado and Andalusian fandangos rests in her voice. And furthermore, as soon as he utters the first syllable, one detects a kind of old soul, which, although residing in a young body, He seems to have already lived 5 past lives during which he has shaped his pronunciation, his accent, his texts, to his words which, not in vain, bring with them tears and healthy sorrow:
And if I had known
That to you I was so insignificant
It would have been wiser to give you my heart
And if I had known that for you everything was a game
That summer, amidst your kisses, I wouldn't have written this song
I've lost you so many times
How inevitable the memory is
And the anguish of the reunion
Your skin against my skin
It has cost me so much, so much
My soul is already withering away
And the little tears that forgot to pray melt away.
If it is «"traditional music", but with enough force to feel that, when it rumbles, there is a fist that pierces our chest, perforates it and bites our insides in search of life. Whoever has lost even the last vestige of survival will fall flat, without knowing how much they have lost in their last breath. In short, in these painful days we are fortunate to have the presence and words of Silvana Estrada.