11.11.19

ENRIQUE IGLESIAS, “DÓNDE ESTÁN CORAZÓN”

1st March, 2008

Wiki | Video

It's appropriate that this song was the new radio single from the greatest-hits comp 95/08 Exitos, since it calls back to Iglesias' earliest 1995 hits in rock instrumentation and moody angst, but he's grown so much as a singer and performer since then -- by which I mean that he's figured out how to make his vocal limitations work for rather than against the emotion of the track -- that it could only have been made in 2008.

He takes the whole song in a low-energy croon, never attempting to reach for notes that he will strain to hit. (Again, he co-wrote it, which seems to help.) There's a laziness (in formal terms) to the singing which from a decade's distance seems to predict the rise of mumble rap and deadpan darlings like Billie Eilish. And while most of Iglesias' material from here on out will be much higher energy, he will never again attempt to be as passionate as he did in the 90s.

"Dónde Están Corazón" is a melancholic song about a universal experience that Spanish calls "desamor," and can be translated "lack of love" or "heartbreak" but more frequently means "falling out of love," the converse of the more frequently celebrated "enamoración" (falling in love). The lyrics are vague as to details -- or generously universal -- but suffused with an appreciation of the closeness and mutual satisfaction that the singer once shared but is now gone forever. I couldn't help comparing it to Juanes' more cheerful song the week before: the lyrics are much less poetic and more straightforward, which is partly the difference between Juanes' vaguely aristocratic rock and Iglesias' more demotic pop.

Not that Enrique is anything but a child of privilege. At this point, he has stopped pretending to be anything else, and it suits him.

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