Si es tan solo amor
by Revólver
How to study this song
The card for “Si es tan solo amor” is built from 35 study entries at A1+: 15 Spanish words, 5 adjectives and 15 verb forms. Work through the glossary first: nena, final and vez are the words you will lean on most. This one leans on its verbs: 15 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| nena | baby, girl (f.) | piccola, bimba | chérie, ma belle | querida, miúda |
What this song teaches you
Level · A1+
- Vocabulary words
- 15
- Adjectives
- 5
- Word combos
- 7
- Expressions
- 12
- Verb forms
- 15
- Quiz questions
- 35
Background
About the song
«Si es tan solo amor» is a song by Revólver, the band led by the singer, guitarist and songwriter Carlos Goñi. He wrote it for «Si no hubiera que correr», the group’s second studio album, which Warner released in 1992. The Spanish Wikipedia entry for the album says it was recorded between September and December 1991 in studios in London, Zurich and Madrid, with Keith Bessey and Nacho Mañó, of the Valencian group Presuntos Implicados, as producers. Goñi sang and played guitar, Sergio Roger played bass and Rafael Picó the drums. The studio version lasts a little over four minutes.
Revólver began in Valencia at the end of the 1980s. Goñi was born in Madrid in 1961 and grew up in Alicante; in 1984 he had founded the band Comité Cisne with the keyboard player José Luis Macías, and he left it in 1988. According to the Spanish Wikipedia the two disagreed about style: Goñi leaned towards American rock and Macías towards the British kind. Revólver was his personal project from the first day, a band name that works almost as a pseudonym, which explains why the musicians around him have changed over the years while the songs have always been his.
The song had two lives. It was chosen as the first single of the 1992 album, and that album sold modestly. Then Goñi took his songs on an acoustic tour, and on 2 April 1993 he recorded a concert with acoustic instruments at the Cinearte studios in Madrid, in front of a small audience. The record that came out of that night, «Básico», followed the model of the MTV Unplugged programmes; Spanish sources describe it as the first acoustic concert album of its kind made in Spain, and it was tied to the radio network Los 40 Principales. The live reading of «Si es tan solo amor», carried by guitars and voice, is the one most listeners know.
The words are spoken to a woman who seems about to leave. The singer wants to know when she last kissed him without needing a reason, counts the roads he wore out for her and for himself, and asks her to look at him and say plainly that it is over. The chorus is an argument with himself: if this is nothing more than love, a thing so beautiful ought to burn only firewood. Yet it hurts so much that he can hardly breathe, and in the end he asks to be allowed to go. For a learner the song is a short lesson in the imperative with pronouns attached to the verb, in the preterite, in questions with "cuándo", "cuántas" and "por qué", and in the verb "doler", which works like "gustar".