Jokes with a passport: writing lyrics for both shores of Spanish

I write from Madrid, but my lyrics travel a long way from my neighbourhood. Most of my listeners are in Spain, the rest of Europe and Latin America. Which means the same line is going to land in ears that understand it in very different ways.

I've already written about the accents and rhymes that change from one country to another. Today I want to go somewhere else: to the words that flip their meaning when they cross the Atlantic, to the humour that arrives intact and the humour that gets stopped at customs. And to how I try to make my songs get the same laugh in Madrid as in Bogotá.

A huge language, many homes

Spanish is a gigantic language. According to the Instituto Cervantes' latest report, it now has more than 500 million native speakers and reaches around 635 million people in total. The vast majority of them don't live in Spain.

That figure has a very practical consequence for anyone writing lyrics: the "home" Spanish I have in my head is just one of many homes. In 2010 the Association of Spanish Language Academies published a Dictionary of Americanisms with around 70,000 entries. Seventy thousand words and expressions used in the Americas, many of which we in Spain have never even heard. It's a vivid way of seeing that there isn't one central Spanish surrounded by peripheral ones. There's one shared language with a lot of different kitchens.

Words that switch sides

Words that change meaning are famous for their sexual mix-ups, and there are plenty of well-worn examples. I'm more interested in subtler ones, the kind that don't trigger a belly laugh but a small emotional short circuit.

My favourite is pena. In Spain, pena means sorrow, pain, pity. But the RAE's student dictionary also records an American use in which pena means embarrassment. In Colombia, for example, "qué pena con usted" is used to apologise before bad news or a request, and has nothing to do with being sad.

Now think of one of my songs, «Mi pena». A black-and-white cover, a man on a rush-seated chair with his head bowed. In Madrid it reads like a copla of grief. In Bogotá, someone could also read it as a confession of shame. And the funny thing is that both readings suit it. Sorrow and shame are close relatives. That double reading doesn't need fixing: it enriches the song instead of breaking it.

There are more cases like this. Bravo is applause in Spain, but in several Latin American countries, such as Colombia, being bravo means being angry. Guagua is the bus in the Canary Islands, Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and in Chile it means baby. A sentence like "la guagua llegó tarde" tells two very different stories depending on where you hear it: a bus running late, or a baby who took their time arriving.

Humour that travels and humour that doesn't

With individual words you can be careful. Humour is harder, because humour is almost never in a single word. It's in what everyone knows without being told.

My lyrics lean heavily on references: TV, brands, shows, cities, characters everyone around me knows. And that's the problem. What's a half-second wink in Madrid can be a meaningless proper noun in Lima.

Broadly speaking, there are three kinds of joke:

• The one that travels alone. Exaggeration, diva drama, the ridiculous, petty revenge. A break-up told as if it were the end of the world is funny anywhere.
• The one that travels with company. A local reference you understand from context, even if you don't know it.
• The one that gets stuck at customs. The one that depends entirely on something only people who've lived here would know.

The first two work for me. The third I try to avoid, or at least not to rest a whole song on it.

A bridge made of two TV shows

There's a line in «Me rindo» ("I give up") that, looking at it now, is almost a manual for solving this. In the middle of a song about disillusion, the narrator remembers the trips to the village, the walks with the dogs, the Christmases, and asks:

¿Todo eso eran tomas falsas de La que se avecina o de Caso cerrado?

("Was all that just bloopers from La que se avecina or Caso cerrado?") One line holds two shows from opposite shores. La que se avecina is a Telecinco sitcom that premiered in 2007 and that almost everyone in Spain knows. Caso cerrado, Dr Ana María Polo's courtroom show, began in 2001, aired on Telemundo and recorded its last episode in 2019. It was made for Spanish-speaking audiences in the Americas.

Someone listening in Madrid grabs onto the first. Someone listening in Mexico City or Miami grabs onto the second. And both understand the same thing: that the relationship looked like a TV drama, the kind with a script, a set and canned applause. The joke works with just one of the two references. With both, it's even better.

A global icon and a local supermarket

Another case I love is «El productor de Madonna no compra en Mercadona» ("Madonna's producer doesn't shop at Mercadona"). Mercadona is a Spanish supermarket chain, and outside Spain plenty of people have never heard of it. But the song doesn't depend on knowing that.

The title already explains nearly everything: someone famous and glamorous set against something everyday and cheap. The whole planet knows Madonna. And the lyric lands the joke with an idea anyone gets, wherever they live:

me he cambiado / a la marca blanca de / Mercadona y / también funciona

("I've switched / to the own brand from / Mercadona and / it works too.") Supermarket own brands are a universal concept. Expensive versus cheap, the diva versus the corner supermarket. Even if you don't know what Mercadona is, you know it isn't Madonna. That's the key to a joke that travels with company: the local reference is stuck to something you understand without a passport.

Sayings that explain themselves

Set phrases are another minefield. Every country has its own, and many don't make sense abroad. But there's a way to use them without leaving anyone out: let the song itself explain them.

In «Ni un pimiento» ("Not worth a pepper"), the expression no vale un pimiento, roughly "it's not worth a thing", is so surrounded by context that you don't need to know it. The lyric talks about crying over the past, about a relationship that wasn't worth it, about laughing out loud. By the time the phrase arrives, its meaning is already clear. If people don't say it that way in your country, you still get it and, on top of that, you pick up a new expression.

I like to think of songs as a form of exchange too. Just as many people learn words from other countries by listening to music from there, someone in Montevideo can learn a Madrid expression from one of my songs. There's no need to erase what's local. You just need to leave it in plain sight so it can be understood.

Queer slang, a language of its own

LGBTQ+ vocabulary deserves its own chapter. Every country has its own words for us, and many were insults before they became pride. That history isn't the same everywhere. A word we've reclaimed with affection in Madrid may still hurt somewhere else, and vice versa.

So when I use street words in my lyrics, I try to make the tone clear about where I'm speaking from. An insult thrown from outside is not the same as a word said with pride from within. The music, the context and the rest of the lyric help make the difference audible, even if the word itself changes from country to country.

What can't be fixed

It isn't always possible. Some jokes lose their sparkle crossing the pond, and that's fine. A song doesn't have to land the same everywhere. Sometimes a lyric is very Madrid and I accept that, because the specific has its charm too, even for people who don't recognise it.

What I do try is to make sure no song depends entirely on a reference only a few will get. If the joke falls flat, the emotion should still stand. If you don't know the show, you should still get the drama. If you don't know a particular supermarket, you should still get the difference between luxury and own brand.

Something else helps: every song has its own page on this site, with the full lyrics. If a word or a reference doesn't land at first, you can read it calmly, look it up or ask. That's another way of building a bridge.

Writing for both shores without losing your own

The temptation, when you write for so many people, is to sand down every edge. To use a neutral Spanish, with no references and no street words. I don't want that. Lab-grown Spanish doesn't make anyone laugh.

I'd rather write from my own shore, with my TV, my supermarkets and my expressions, and build bridges inside the song itself: a reference from here next to one from there, a context that explains the word, a joke that rests on something universal.

I'm an indie alternative artist, I call myself the first AI singer-songwriter, and I write every lyric thinking about someone I don't know who lives far away. That listener makes me more precise, more curious and more generous with what I tell.

In the end, the two shores share more than it seems. We've all had a relationship that looked like a soap opera. We've all compared the expensive with the cheap. We've all cried and blamed it on something else. On that common ground you can build plenty of jokes that travel far.