I Found It, I Found It! – One Man’s Persistence To Find That One Song

I think Cynthia would be quite proud of me when she reads this entry.

I don’t know how you remember your overseas trips.  Or moments of your life.  Maybe you write journals, maybe you take pictures.  On top of the words and images and the memory living in those who share the moments with you and will one day remind you that ‘you were there’, I remember trips or moments by the music I repeatedly listened to when I was there.  Vividly I can recall where I was when I heard the song “Nobody Knows” or “U Were Meant For Me”.  I have old school mates till today still tease me of the song “Superwoman”.  That song I was used to blast out loud from my room while I was inside the shower room down the corridor.  Every morning.

In Spain, we rented a car.  And inside the car, we listened to the local radio.  You know what radio stations are like.  Some songs you get to hear every day, even a couple of times a day.  And there was this one song that Cynthia and I both like but could not catch who the artist was.  In Spain, we walked.  And one time, that one song was playing on the ground floor, from an old building made of stone, music coming out from an open window.  I was tempted to knock at the window and ask who sings that song.

For the last few weeks, after we returned to Singapore, every now and then I tried to Google the artist.  It was fruitless for I only know one or two words from the song and it’s a common Spanish word.  I tried to listen to the Internet Radio and catch who the artist is.  But my Spanish is very minimal.

So I painstakingly combed through the Spanish chart online.  Combing through all the popular songs that are now playing on air all the way to the beginning of this year.  I play each song from YouTube and memorize who is who.  After a while, I begin to recognize patterns – the pattern of multiple releases by the same artist and the pattern of how songs are moving up and down the chart across the time horizon.  I know the texture of the voice that sings that one song.  And I know that the song I am looking for is still playing in the air so it should be originating from the chart.  Or maybe the artist has recently died and this riddle would be quite hard for me to solve.

And like all good things in life, once you found that something, it seems so easy.  The song is called “El Aleph” by Nena Daconte.  Click here for music and lyrics from YouTube.  Or here for the official video.  I am pretty sure I will buy their album for memory’s sake.

External Link: Official Site of Nena Daconte