La trama y el desenlace

About the song

«La trama y el desenlace» («The Plot and the Ending») is a song by the Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler. It is the second track of «Amar la trama», the album he released with Warner Music on 16 March 2010, and it lasts just over four minutes. Drexler wrote it himself, and the album borrows its title from the idea at the heart of this song: loving the plot of a story more than the way it ends.

Drexler was born in Montevideo on 21 September 1964 and trained as a doctor, specialising in ear, nose and throat medicine at the University of the Republic. Music slowly took over. In 1995 the Spanish singer Joaquín Sabina invited him to Madrid, where he recorded his albums and where he eventually settled. In 2005 he became the first Uruguayan to win an Academy Award, for «Al otro lado del río», the song he wrote for the film «The Motorcycle Diaries», and the first song in Spanish to receive the Oscar for Best Original Song.

«Amar la trama» was made in an unusual way. Instead of working for months in a closed studio, Drexler and his musicians recorded the songs in four days, from 1 to 4 November 2009, at the Estudios Cata in Madrid, a television set where a small audience sat in front of the band. The listeners, about twenty per session, were chosen through an online contest. Drexler explained that he sings better with people in front of him and that he wanted to avoid the coldness of a recording studio. The album was produced by the Argentine Matías Cella, with Drexler and Carles «Campi» Campón as co-producers, and the musicians included the American organist Ben Sidran and the Spanish actress and singer Leonor Watling, Drexler's partner. The standard edition came with a documentary on DVD, «La trama circular», which shows those sessions.

The song tells a very simple scene. Two people walk arm in arm through the streets of Madrid on a free afternoon, slowly, with nowhere to go and nothing to do but stroll. At some point, without either of them planning it, one of them changes step until both walk at exactly the same rhythm. That tiny change is the whole story: a small jump, almost hidden, that the song compares to two strings that sound together, to the same number appearing on different dice, to soldiers marching in step and to two blinking lights that suddenly flash at the same time. The two distracted walkers manage, for a moment, to stop the time of sadness. The chorus pairs verbs of movement, going and coming, following and guiding, giving and having, entering and leaving, and then states the idea that gives its name to the album. Near the end, the singer imagines wandering around like the characters of a film by the French director Éric Rohmer, without waiting for anything in particular to happen.