El paraíso

About the song

«El paraíso» is the song that closes «El miedo y el paraíso», the first solo album by Mikel Izal, the singer and songwriter who for twelve years had fronted the Spanish indie-pop band IZAL. Izal was born in Pamplona in 1982, grew up in Vitoria from the age of nine and studied telecommunications engineering before music took over his life. He started writing songs as a teenager on software synthesizers, moved to the guitar a few years later and, after meeting the guitarist Emanuel Pérez in 2009, built the band that carried his surname. IZAL released «Magia y efectos especiales» (2012), «Agujeros de gusano», «Copacabana», «Autoterapia» and «Hogar», and filled arenas across Spain before announcing an indefinite break at the end of 2022.

After that stop, Izal spent more than two years writing on his own. The result was a record of ten songs, each named after a basic emotion or state of mind — fear, rage, gluttony, faith, the truth, the present — arranged as a journey that begins with «El miedo» and ends, precisely, with «El paraíso». The song came out as a single in July 2023, as the second preview of the album after «La fe». It was produced by the duo Santos&Fluren together with Izal himself, GARABATTO and Liam Garner, and it swaps the electric guitars of the band years for electronic beats and synthesizers, with a bright, summery pulse.

The lyric reads like a thank-you note written in front of the sea. The narrator wants to sign a last letter to a place and to the person who shared it with him: a coastal town that is dressed up like a party, beautiful and ugly at the same time, provincial and urban at once. In the verses he remembers the small rituals of a happy period — concerts that were sad and still cheered them up, a few beers to let off steam, an aperitif at noon, a terrace where they watched life go by and invented excuses to see each other several times a week. The chorus describes paradise as a place where you do not even know whether it is raining outside, where time stretches without limit and anything seems possible.

For a Spanish learner the song is a small treasure of everyday structures. It uses gerunds with attached pronouns (giving thanks, opening up, travelling), the imperfect to describe habits in the past («we used to invent», «it worried us»), «estar» plus a gerund for an action in progress, and even an imperfect subjunctive after «tan… que» to express a wished-for consequence. It also packs a handful of idioms that native speakers use every day: opening something wide, land in sight, dressed up for a gala, letting yourself be carried along, and «pedir por esa boca», the playful way of telling someone they can ask for anything they want.