Joan Manuel Serrat

Joan Manuel Serrat, from Barcelona, embodies the figure of the singer-songwriter in Spain more than anyone else. His discography is split between albums in Castilian and others in Catalan, a language whose cultural relevance he has always staunchly supported, despite being opposed to Catalan independence, which he considers economically unable to survive without Spain's support. This article focuses on "Mediterráneo", his eighth album, the fourth in Castilian: without wishing to diminish the culture the author comes from, he himself regards work in the national language as being on a par with that in his own regional tongue. Moreover, the impact of this particular record was such that the choice felt almost inevitable.

As with other albums of his, "Mediterráneo" was recorded in Milan, at the Fonit Cetra studios, with the support of sound engineer Plinio Chiesa (the equipment available there was at the time superior to anything to be found in backward, Francoist Spain). Unlike previous occasions, however, when the arrangements and production had been entrusted exclusively to Spanish musicians, this time Serrat wanted the involvement of one of the great grey eminences of Italian music: thus, direction of the sessions was jointly entrusted to Juan Carlos Calderón and Gian Piero Reverberi.

Calderón was at the time one of the rising stars of his own scene, and his arrangements had already backed singer-songwriters such as Luis Eduardo Aute and Serrat himself, effectively giving a strong boost to the birth of a local scene later dubbed the nueva canción española, which emerged from Catalonia itself in the 1960s and went on to mark the entire national culture with its metaphorical lyrics, often at odds with the precepts of Francoism, even though they could not be openly militant.

Reverberi, on the other hand, needs no particular introduction, at least for anyone versed in the ABCs of Italian popular music.

Perhaps because my childhood is still playing on your beaches,

among your reeds sleeps my first love.

I carry your light and your scent with me wherever I go,

and piled up on your sand

I keep love, games and sorrows, I,

who carry on my skin the bitter taste of the eternal weeping

that a hundred lands have poured into you, from Algeciras to Istanbul,

so that I might paint your long winter nights blue,

and through sheer misadventure,

your soul is deep and dark,

and my eyes have grown used to your red sunsets,

as the bend grows used to the road.

I'm a singer, I'm a liar, I love games and wine,

I have the soul of a sailor.

What can I do about it if I was born in the Mediterranean?

And you draw near and leave again after kissing my village,

playing with the tide, you leave thinking of returning,

you're like a woman scented with tar,

who is desired and loved,

who is known and feared.

If one day, to my misfortune, death comes looking for me,

push my boat into the sea with an autumn wind from the east,

and let the storm destroy its white wings,

and bury me without mourning,

between the beach and the sky,

on the side of a mountain higher than the horizon,

I want to have a good view,

my body will be a path, I'll give green to the pines

and yellow to the broom,

near the sea, because I

was born in the Mediterranean

The line between singer-songwriter craft and poetry is a much-debated one, but in the title track that opens the album, Serrat crosses it decisively — much like the sea he sings of, which breaks down every border and sweeps past it.

Serrat's Mediterranean is a body of water that doesn't divide but rather joins together: Spain to Morocco, the Balkans to France, Syria to Greece, Italy to Turkey, and so on. A placid, radiant centre that bathes and lends colour to an embrace between lands, oblivious and indifferent to any division imposed by armies and governments.

This vision, in which Serrat's silhouette blurs into the surroundings just as it does on the album's iconic cover, is a cry for freedom more powerful and universal than countless anti-war lyrics. Written during his retreat at the Montserrat monastery, where he shut himself away with other artists in protest against the Burgos trial under Franco, the poem was later set to a buoyant guitar arrangement, carried along by flute lines and crackling string flourishes as insinuating as a sea breeze.

Although it contains no direct reference to the dictatorship or to Spain's turmoil in 1971, back home almost no other song is held in such regard as a protest anthem as "Mediterraneo" is.

Just as universal is the message held within the following "Aquellas Pequenas Cosas", framed by a slow acoustic guitar arpeggio and dramatic streaks of violin. Here Serrat reflects on the value of those small details locked away in memory, capable of unleashing overwhelming feelings of melancholy and sadness.

One might think that time and absence have killed them,

but their train only ever bought a round-trip ticket,

they are those little things

that a time of roses left behind for us,

tucked in a corner, on a scrap of paper or in a drawer.

Like a thief they watch you from behind the door,

they hold such power over you,

like dead leaves

that the wind drags here and there,

that smile at you, sadly, and

they make us cry when no one's watching

Memories resurface again toward the end of the album, in the wistful "Barquita de papel" (little paper boat). The games and imagination of childhood become a counterpoint to the practical and cognitive struggles of adult life, but they also turn into an old, safe harbor to dock in when overwhelmed by life's hardships.

The freedom Serrat sings of, the undisputed protagonist of the tracklist, isn't confined to geographic borders — it's a deep, intoxicating feeling that should be breathed in at every moment of one's life. So what appears on the surface to be a love song, "La mujer que yo quiero", is actually something more: an anthem to the need to live out a relationship heedless of imperfections and the judgment of others (in the song's context, that of his parents), to be free to choose someone who is simply right for oneself. The second verse also lands a jab at Catholic morality, no small thing in the context of Franco's Spain:

The woman I love doesn't need

to bathe every night in holy water.

She has many flaws, my mother says,

and too many bones, says my father.

But she is more true than bread and earth,

my love is a love that comes from before the war.

To know it, the woman I love doesn't need

to pluck the petals of a daisy every night

Alongside the usual strings, in what is quite possibly the lushest arrangement on the whole album, Serrat's wistful baritone is wrapped here in bells, guitar strings plucked like a music box, and sweet female choruses. The hand of Reverberi is strongly felt, along with the modus operandi he had used and would go on to use with various Italian singer-songwriters (Lucio Battisti, Lucio Dalla, Fabrizio De André, Gino Paoli).

Serrat's stature as a poet emerges with almost violent force in "Pueblo blanco". Written entirely in seven-syllable lines and steeped in a spectral arrangement of acoustic guitar and lashing strings, the song unfolds in three sections. In the first, the singer-songwriter describes a small rural village in Andalusia — Mojácar, according to some, Belchite according to others (his mother's hometown, where Serrat himself spent his childhood) — making the listener almost feel the aridity of a certain southern Spain, yet also its unchanging enchantment:

Perched on the edge of a ravine

my white village sleeps,

under a sky that, from

never seeing the sea,

has forgotten how to weep.

Through its narrow streets of dust and stone,

since not even the war passed through here,

only oblivion walks slowly along the valley,

where no flower grows,

nor does any shepherd pass with his flock

In the next part, however, the minstrel introduces some figures from the local population, in particular young people, revealing their worries and their torments, before inviting them, in the third part, to a sorrowful farewell:

Flee, tender folk,

for this land is sick,

and do not wait for tomorrow

to give you what yesterday did not,

because there is nothing to be done,

take your mule, your woman and your load,

follow the path of the Jewish people

and look for another moon

maybe tomorrow fortune will smile

and if you have to cry

it's better to do it facing the sea

“Que va a ser de ti” (“What will become of you, far from home, my little one,” as the song goes on) is the cry of a father whose daughter is leaving home to make her own way, having come of age to the metaphorical rhythm of the changing seasons. The track is as buoyant and cheerful in its first part, which tells of the girl's longing for freedom, as it turns dark in the second, where the swelling choir lays bare the void she leaves behind in her parents, abandoned in a nest now filled only with worry and loneliness.

What still shines through is the songwriter's fierce belief in freedom, to be pursued even at the cost of leaving one's roots behind, whether of blood or of place. Here too the subtext defies Catholic morality, through the daughter's disobedience toward her parents and her departure from the family hearth.

Free of melancholy by contrast, and driven by an arrangement that moves from solemn guitars into strings and thundering percussion, “Vagabundear” is a hymn to tearing down every border, laced with a none-too-subtle hostility toward Francoist nationalism:

Tired of being tired, I've grown weary

of asking the world why, why,

the compass rose will have to help me

and from now on you'll see me wandering

between the sky and the sea,

wandering like a kite of cane and paper,

I'll follow a cloud to be faithful to it,

to the mountains, to the rivers, to the sun and the sea,

to those who taught me the verb to love,

I am a homing pigeon,

leave me in peace.

I don't feel a stranger anywhere,

wherever there's fire and wine, I have my home,

and so as not to forget what I once was,

I carry my homeland and my guitar within me,

one is strong and faithful,

the other a piece of paper.

Don't cry because I won't be staying,

you've given me all you know how to give,

the shadow that falls on a wall in the afternoon

and the wine that helps me forget my thirst,

what more can a woman offer.

It's beautiful to leave without saying goodbye,

serene the gaze, steady the voice,

if you truly look for me, you will find me,

the road is too long to look back,

what does it matter, here or there

“Lucia” instead takes the shape of a letter to an old lover, a lost love never forgotten, riding a piano arpeggio that grows ever more tense and searing as memories and regrets resurface. The song closes almost abruptly, swallowed by a sudden, unexpected burst of strings: a sign that for Serrat, memories and the feelings they stir are important, but so is moving on.

“Tio Alberto” is dedicated to Alberto Puig Palau, a Barcelona aristocrat of the era known for his role as a patron and for his support of flamenco and the Roma community (source: Sebas E. Alonso for “Je ne sais pop”, November 16, 2021):

Uncle Alberto has tasted every wine,

has walked a thousand paths

and docked in port after port

between ruin and riches,

between lies and promises,

he still knows how to smile, uncle Alberto

Yet another example of Serrat's style, as ever adept at blending Spanish folk, elements of French chanson, and modern arrangements with touches bordering on jazz (courtesy of Calderón) and chamber music. In a sound that's full but never overly melodramatic, the song remembers the uncle as a resilient figure, at times sad and disillusioned, but always carrying an unshakeable dignity. His figure thus becomes a metaphor for a part of the Spanish population, abused, suppressed, but never truly beaten or tamed.

Closing out the album's thirty-three minutes is its most overtly political track, “Vencidos”, which sets to music a poem by León Felipe, one of Spain's most important men of letters, who died in exile in Mexico in 1968 after having supported the Republican side during the civil war. Cervantes' most famous characters and the messages of Antonio Machado (another poet dear to Serrat, who in 1969 released the album “Dedicado a Antonio Machado, poeta”) symbolize the “vanquished” of the title, becoming, amid recalcitrant strings and a guitar plucked in the manner of a medieval minstrel, a metaphor for the victims of the Franco dictatorship:

For the plain of La Mancha

the figure of Don Quixote

is seen passing by once more,

and now, idle and battered,

the armor rides upon the nag,

and idle rides the knight,

without breastplate and without backplate,

he goes laden with bitterness,

for there his loving battle

found its burial

"Mediterráneo" was released in November 1971, reaching number 1 on the Spanish charts on 27 December and holding the top spot for 21 weeks, making it by far the best-selling album of 1972. To this day it stands as Serrat's quintessential album (which would already be a major achievement in itself, given the sheer scale of his career) and, more broadly, it has become one of the symbols of Spanish culture and of 1970s singer-songwriter music. For the Italian music scene of the time, having contributed to its making is a notable point of pride.

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09/02/2025