Antonio de García de Diego’s piano plays and Joaquín Sabina’s quincallera voice enters: “When my face doesn’t appear in the newspapers, nor do the bride and groom dance on wedding nights, when it’s only fashionable if I fall off the stage again.” . The song is called One last waltz, It is written by Sabina himself together with Benjamín Prado and produced by Leiva. Sabina (Úbeda, 75 years old) has just presented a new song, a ballad with her stamp: twilight, dragged, cynical, night owl and hooligan. He alludes to his own defects and some virtues and highlights episodes of his life, such as his famous fall into the pit of the WiZink Center in February 2020.
Almost as important as the song is the video, a gathering of friends who come together to entertain the protagonist and have a last drink. First Leiva appears, then Joan Manuel Serrat. And so on until completing twenty colleagues and friends: Ricardo Darín, José Tomás (with long hair and beard), Andrés Calamaro, Ariel Rot, Benjamín Prado, Luis García Montero, Juan Gabriel Vásquez, Alejo Stivel, Jorge Drexler… They also appear women, in the background: Sabina’s partner, Jimena Coronado, and the singer’s daughters, Carmela and Rocío. The video, which takes place in a cocktail bar, is directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, responsible for the documentary about the musician, Feeling very sorry, released in 2022, a year before the last song published by Sabina, Against all odds (in March 2023).
This is how León de Aranoa defines the objective of the video: “If this is going to be, as he says, Joaquín Sabina’s last video clip, his last waltz, there was no choice but to go out and dance with him. The song has a lot of inventory, farewell, confession. Nothing more cinematic than doing it to a bartender, at that time when the bars are about to close. It’s in many movies, it refers to the Nighthawks from Hopper’s painting, at the end of Fat Citythe John Huston film, in which Stacey Keach desperately looks for an interlocutor on the other side of the bar, to whom she may later have nothing to say.
The song and video come with a third announcement, that of the dates of the Spanish leg of the tour that was announced in summer as the last in large venues. Is called Hello and goodbye, will tour America starting in January 2025 and will stop in 16 Spanish cities after starting in Gran Canaria on May 1, 2025. Next Monday, October 21 at 12 noon, tickets will go on sale through holayadioslagira.es and jsabina.com.
Although he anticipates that after this Hello and goodbye “There will be no more endless journeys through crowded venues,” the artist keeps up his sleeve “the ace of reappearing at will, whether because the muses whisper poems or songs worth sharing, or because he feels the urge to get on.” to any platform to give, give us, a tribute.”
Babelia
The literary news analyzed by the best critics in our weekly newsletter
RECEIVE IT