What Tomeu Penya was like, according to his daughter, Alexandra Nicolau: "He's the person who makes me laugh the most in the world."

PalmHe's a living legend, the king of Catalan country music. Son of Toni Nicolau and Maria Morlà, "day laborers who survived on little money and bartered with neighbors," who had no connection to music beyond knowing how to dance the canoe. And yet, when the boy said he wanted to be a singer, Toni Nicolau went to Manacor to buy him a guitar. A gesture that changed the life of little Tomeu Nicolau Morlà from Vilafranca de Bonany, born in 1949, whom everyone now knows by the stage name Tomeu Penya.

The one who tells us this is Alexandra Nicolau, Tomeu's daughter, who makes it clear from the beginning that her father is "her best friend": "Spending time with him is one of my favorite activities. He's the person who makes me laugh the most in the world. There are no taboo subjects between us. We have the dirtiest complicity. We look a lot alike. He's a very open-minded person. I can confess anything to him, even intimate things, and he never, ever judges me," she says. Beyond having had a busy life, full of tours and trips here and there, and having met many different people, Alexandra says that being "open-minded" runs in the family: "I didn't know my godparents, but the fact that in 1960, in Vilafranca de Bonany, they didn't laugh at my guitar says a lot about what her father and mother were like."

In fact, Tomeu's brother, Jordi Nicolau, was once a professional cyclist—a rare thing, too, back then in the village. "I suppose Jordi paved the way," reflects Àlex, who recounts that the sudden death of his father opened a wound in Tomeu's skin that still oozes a little every day: "I think my father has written many songs as therapy for the loss of his brother," says the daughter.

By the time she was born, in 1989, Tomeu Penya had already released seven albums and a compilation. In other words, the father Àlex remembers was already "famous" and "clinging to a guitar": "I saw a father who went to the studio every day, who played the guitar for two or three hours every day. And he still does. It's incredible. It's not magic: it's work." Because of this life, he was also a father who wasn't there many days. The time we didn't share doesn't come back, but she keeps inside all the joy of when her father returned from a tour or a concert: "He always came back with a CD or a film for me. He hid it from me, as if it were a treasure hunt. He did it for years, I have a brutal collection. Britney Spears and Spice Girls!"

Until recently, Tomeu was not aware of how important that gesture was for her daughter, who tells us an anecdote: "A few years ago, we both did one road trip through the United States. More than 3,000 km by car. We spent nine days singing, and my father freaked out because he discovered I was a music geek and that I sang all the songs. How could I not be? He, with the records he brought me, made it happen! From this trip came the idea of recording a song together; the result is a bilingual version of Have you ever seen de rain?.

Alexandra recounts with emotion that her father sang to her Yesterday, of the Beatles before going to bed; she celebrates that, with more than 50 years of experience, her father is still surprised that the public goes to his concerts; that he goes down to his usual bar in Vilafranca to have coffee and play tuti; that he enjoys like a child the ribs and whisky cake at El Cruce, his trusted place. "My father doesn't need to do anything else. He's already done everything. And maybe it sounds naive, but I think I must have done something right in another life for being his daughter." And she adds: "And I know that when he reads this, he'll say I've left him too well." Don't scold her too much, Tome.