Perhaps the most notable thing about this song is that it ushered Juanes into the exclusive club of those who have replaced themselves at #1 in any chart. He is actually the first to achieve that milestone on the Hot Latin chart (or the second if Alejandro Fernández replacing his own duet with Gloria Estefan counts with a sixth week of "Si Tu Supieras" in 1997 counts) -- and of course he wouldn't have done it if the Hot Latin chart, determined as much by airplay as by digital sales at this point, wasn't so friendly to bringing songs back to the #1 spot: although on this travelogue Wisin & Yandel's "Sexy Movimiento" has come between "Me Enamora" and "Gotas de Agua Dulce," on the chart it was a week sandwiched between month-long reigns of "Me Enamora."
But the first clause of the above paragraph isn't necessarily fair: it's a fine pop song regardless of stats-nerd chartspotting. Juanes' reggae-inflected rock and roll is slightly modified by more local Colombian rhythms (I think I hear cumbia, or maybe champeta, within the skank), and the falsetto crowing with which he introduces the song is delightfully high-spirited, a Peter Pan ebullience which is perfectly matched to the Never-Never Land of cheery bluff his music increasingly occupies.
The parent album is titled La Vida... Es un Ratico (Life...is a moment), which sounds like it might contain existentialist drama, but instead is full of cheerful tropical rock, comfortable as old shoes, taking the "eat, drink and be merry" view rather than the "memento mori" one. (Not that they're mutually exclusive.) "Gotas de Agua Dulce" means "drops of fresh water," one of a series of images he uses in the chorus to describe his love for the indispensable "you" of every love-song lyric: wishes that feed the heart, drugs that immunize him to pain, drops of fresh water, ray of sunlight. As ever, Latin Pop tends to be more poetic, even archaically so, than Anglophone pop with similar commercial ambitions: few North American lyricists this side of Leonard Cohen would care to pile up metaphor so recklessly. Maybe that's why "Hallelujah" is so overplayed, to make up for the poetry deficiency in English-language pop.
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