Caminando por la vida

About the song

Ramón Melendi Espina was born in Oviedo, in the northern Spanish region of Asturias, on 21 January 1979, and for most of his teens he expected to make his living with his feet rather than his voice: he played in the youth ranks of Real Oviedo and only walked away from the game at the beginning of 2001. The guitar took over almost immediately. He put together a band called El Bosque de Sherwood that same year, went solo in 2002, and in 2003 released a first album, «Sin noticias de Holanda», that turned a local curiosity into a national name. What made him stand out was the mismatch between where he came from and how he sang: an Asturian with a rainy-north accent performing rumba, a style that Spanish listeners associate with Andalusia, Catalonia and the Roma musical families who kept it alive.

The second album, «Que el cielo espere sentao», arrived on 25 April 2005 on Carlito Records, produced by Kike Eizaguirre and recorded and mixed by Iván Domínguez at the Oasis studios. The title is already a lesson in how the record sounds: the standard adjective is «sentado», and the missing -d- is not a typing slip but the way the word is sung in colloquial speech across much of Spain. «Caminando por la vida» opens the album, runs for three minutes and thirty-two seconds, and was chosen as the first single, followed later by «Con sólo una sonrisa» and «Novia a la fuga». It is a rumba: hand-clapped rhythm, nylon-string guitar, a chorus built to be shouted back by a crowd, and a vocal delivered fast and slightly behind the beat.

The words are a self-portrait rather than a story. The singer opens with the smell of spring in the air and jokes that his heart is allergic to it; he drives along the road singing, with the sun riding beside him like a co-driver. He does not need a star to guide him to anyone’s doorway, because the night before, drunk, he had the good sense to leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind him — a wink at Hansel and Gretel that also admits how the evening ended. The chorus is the part everyone in Spain can still finish: he moves through life steadily, in no rush and with no intention of stopping, trying not to make a fuss, wearing a smile instead of clothes, free of hang-ups and free of fears, singing rumbas full of colour. Crying costs him nothing, he says, on one condition: that the person he is singing to does not cry too.

Two short verses do the rest of the work. In one he explains the nickname the flamenco and Roma scene gave him, and why: when he picks up his guitar his feet start moving without asking permission. In the other he asks the sky for the coming year to bring him only the health he had last year — money he does not need, because in love he already has more than enough. The bridge turns negative and is the sharpest part of the lyric: no love that is not returned, no wars, no friends who would stop caring if he lost his stripes, no flowers thrown at him and no blank, insincere looks, because a look that says nothing says nothing about the heart behind it.