The songs that one day will make us cry

PalmaI remember the exact pressure I had to apply to the button on my mother's car glove compartment for it to open. Also the wide and round shape, and the soft touch of the plastic when I operated it, making a soft, muffled, almost spongy click. I liked the pleasant sensation of that button and the power it gave me. It was the era when we had the black Peugeot 206. That is to say, it was the early 2000s and I, the sole co-pilot of our vessel.

I opened and closed the glove compartment to take out the cases where we kept our CDs: my mother's, the pink fabric one; and mine, the Coca-Cola advertising tin one. We negotiated and alternated Chenoa with Estopa, Upa Dance with Malú, and El canto del loco with Whitney Houston. I listened to the songs my mother liked until they became mine too. Deep down, I was also aware that sticking to my programming was asking too much. But, without a doubt, she won the battle the day she played La Oreja de Van Gogh for me for the first time. Then, it was done. Our lives synchronized to the same soundtrack.

It was the golden age of low-rise jeans, belts, and crop tops, to be blond and to be dark-haired. It was the time of the white parties, of the Ibizan style, of the large sunglasses, of the sandals with a little heel, of the tattoos of stars, suns and moons. In my memory, everything is part of the same universe: my mother, her friends and Amaia Montero singing Tell the sun, 1998. Listen “And I walked through my mind, and found / That corner I left for you” and I remember a youth that was not mine, but that I lived as my own, mirroring myself in all of them.

Music helps us anchor the present in memory: it is the anchor of moments we will have to return to, to laugh or to cry. Or both, depending on the moment. You never know when it will be the last time you listen to that song in the same way: your mother's favorite, the first one dedicated to you, the one we liked so much to dawdle. We will return. I will return, transformed into another. Just to know who I was in the summer of 2003, when I first held in my hands What I told you while you were pretending to sleep.

Music has a sensuality that goes beyond hearing. Music, we cannot touch it, but who dares to deny its physicality. I remember the sensation of touching the cover of that album: a digipack of rigid and soft cardboard, covered by a matte film, which opened like a book. The feel remained stuck in my hands, learned by heart. I liked to pick it up, hold it, caress it, as if wanting to make it mine. I liked it so much that I wanted all my senses to know it, even rounding the corners.

I was sitting at the painting table when my mother arrived with him, freshly bought, with the impatience of a treasure to be shared. Three years after the last album, Copperpot's journey, and after having exhausted all the songs, we finally had 15 new ones, ready for us to unravel them one by one. Perhaps this was the first record I owned, even if it was in shared custody with my mother. That was no longer just the band of her youth: it had become the band of my childhood. And this was the first time we were listening to a new album as fans, both of us; the first time we were exposing ourselves together and at the same time to this same feeling, forever fossilizing that shared experience.

Without knowing it, the first time we heard Puedes contar conmigo, Rosas and 20 de enero in a row, we cast an anchor to which a small part of us would be forever tied. All those songs opened a door in time that we would cross every time we heard one of its chords, returning to that moment, like a blessing or a curse.

With the tour of that album, my first concert also arrived, although of that performance by La Oreja de Van Gogh in Mallorca I only remember the merchandise turban my mother bought me as a souvenir. It was everything to me: black, and with the blue drawing of the pictograms they had created as a brand for that album, where the protagonist was a sleeping woman, like Amaia on the album cover. I didn't stop wearing it even when, from stretching so much, the lycra started to tear the drawing.

Now, 20 years later, I could think that all that was a dream, if it weren't for this detail, so vivid. “No matter how much detail and conviction we bring to the narration; no matter how much effort we invest, no one can guarantee its adherence to reality. We are the movie we tell ourselves,” says Bardají in his article La música es un vínculo esencial, published in Sustrato. And so it is. Our life needs a soundtrack to explain itself. Or as Bardají says: “It is beautiful to resort to music to remember, to trace a link, to say what we don't know how to pronounce”.