Agua

About the song

«Agua» («Water») is a song by Jarabe de Palo, the Barcelona band led by the singer, songwriter and guitarist Pau Donés. It is the sixth of the fourteen tracks on «Depende» («It depends»), the group's second studio album, which came out in 1998; the Spanish iTunes store dates the album to 7 September 1998, and the studio version of the song lasts a little over four minutes. «Agua» was one of the seven songs from the album that were released as singles, together with the title track «Depende», «A lo loco», «Perro apaleao», «Duerme conmigo», «Pura sangre» and «Realidad o sueño». It is a slow and melancholic piece, very different from the cheerful Latin rhythm that had made the band famous, and over the years it became one of the best-loved ballads in its repertoire.

Jarabe de Palo was formed in Barcelona in the middle of the 1990s. Its name plays with a Spanish expression: «jarabe de palo», literally «stick syrup», is a joking way of talking about a good beating. Pau Donés, born in Barcelona on 11 October 1966, started playing at the age of fifteen with his brother Marc in a group called J. & Co. Band, later renamed Dentaduras Postizas («False Teeth»), and for years he combined music with a job in an advertising agency, which paid for his first recording equipment. The band's first album, «La flaca» (1996), took its title from a song Donés wrote after a trip to Cuba. It was not an immediate success: the song only became famous about a year later, when it was used in a television advertisement, and from then on the album sold very well in several countries.

For the second album the band travelled to London. According to the Spanish-language Wikipedia, «Depende» was produced by Joe Dworniak and recorded over two months at Moody Studios. The flamenco group Ketama took part as guests, and the album ends with «A lo loco», a duet with the Cuban singer Celia Cruz; the Italian edition added «Dipende», a version of the title song sung in Italian. The ironic lyrics of «Depende» reached a large audience in Spain and Latin America and also in Italy, a country that remained important for the band for the rest of its career.

The story told in «Agua» is simple and sad. A man answers a woman who wants to be his friend, and he wonders how that could ever work when he feels so much more for her that he would give everything for her. He is afraid of misreading her smiles and her tenderness, and he describes the two of them as a difficult mixture of opposites: the head against the body, desire against the rules. The central image gives the song its title: being thirsty and discovering that the water is out of reach. Facing that problem, he weighs his options, which are to keep away from her, to give up what feels natural, or simply to let things flow, and in the end he admits that what he really wants to tell her is hidden between the lines of a letter. The Spanish water portal iagua.es describes it as a song about a friendship that becomes something more for only one of the two people, with water and thirst as the metaphor for that impossible love.