Sin documentos
by Los Rodríguez
How to study this song
Learning “Sin documentos” means 41 entries at A1+ — 15 Spanish words, 5 adjectives and 21 verb forms, every one taken from what the song actually says. Begin with viento, documentos and tiempo: get those and most of the lines stop being guesswork. This one leans on its verbs: 21 distinct forms against 5 adjectives, so conjugation is where the effort goes. At this level the goal is recognition: hear a word, place it, keep going.
The words of this song, in several languages
Every word below is taken from this song and translated by us. Nothing here is the lyric itself — these are the individual words you need in order to follow it.
Vocabulary
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| viento | wind (m.) | vento | vent | vento | wind | Wind |
| documentos |
Adjectives
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| único | only, only one (m.) | unico | seul, unique | único | enige | einzig |
This card holds 4 more adjectives. You meet them when you play the song.
Verb forms
| ES | EN | IT | FR | PT | NL | DE |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| déjame | let me (tú, imperative) | lasciami | laisse-moi | deixa-me | laat me | lass mich |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 15
- Adjectives
- 5
- Word combos
- 12
- Expressions
- 11
- Verb forms
- 21
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Sin documentos» is the title song of the second studio album by Los Rodríguez, a rock band formed in Madrid at the start of the 1990s. The album reached Spanish shops in 1993 on the GASA label, part of the Warner group (the Spanish Wikipedia entry gives 21 May 1993), and was released in Argentina in September of the same year. The song lasts a little under five minutes and was written by Andrés Calamaro, the band’s singer and keyboard player.
Los Rodríguez were a band between two countries. Calamaro had been a member of Los Abuelos de la Nada in Buenos Aires; the guitarists Ariel Rot, also Argentine, and Julián Infante had played together in Tequila, one of the best-loved Spanish groups of the late 1970s; Germán Vilella played the drums, and Daniel Zamora played bass on this record. The name is a joke taken from the Spanish expression "estar de Rodríguez", said of a man who stays in the city alone while his family is away on holiday.
The album was recorded at the Eurosonic studios in Madrid between mid-March and mid-April 1993 and produced by the British engineer Nigel Walker together with the band. According to a long account published by the Argentine newspaper La Nación in 2018, the demo had been turned down by several Spanish labels before the head of GASA received a cassette on Christmas Eve 1992. The same article says that Calamaro wrote the song at home in Madrid with two references in mind: the hit «Chiquilla» by the Valencian band Seguridad Social and the album «Vol. 5» by Los Fabulosos Cadillacs. The result is rock played with the pulse of a rumba, a rockabilly snare drum over a bass line borrowed from Latin dance music.
The words are a declaration of love told as a border crossing. The singer asks to be let through with no papers at all, in the name of the time the couple has shared; he wants to be the only man in her life, promises to come back the next morning and admits that he cannot bear a full day away from her. When the chorus arrives he gives no argument: he feels this way just because. La Nación points to two stories behind the title: the drummer, born in Puerto Rico, had spent eight years in Madrid without his papers in order, and Calamaro had recently married. For a learner the song is a compact lesson in the present subjunctive after "que", the simple future and the conditional.