Writing in two languages: what changes when my lyrics are in Spanish or in English

I can often tell which language a song is going to be in before I have the first line, just from the way it starts arriving. When it comes in Spanish, it comes fast, in long sentences that insist on telling you something with a first name and a surname. When it comes in English, it comes slowly, with blank space between the lines, like someone laying stones to cross a river.

Most of my lyrics are in Spanish. But the archive also holds songs written entirely in English: «Gatekeeping», «Holy Stillness», «Boys Like Us», «The Great Depression». And on the other side of the catalogue are the ones that could only ever have come out in Spanish, like «Mi novio de Albacete», «Eso es lefa» or «No quiero otro novio cojín». I have written before about lyrics that switch language halfway through a line. This piece is about something else: what changes in the craft depending on the language, who I am writing for when I write in Spanish, and how each language sounds when the music and the vocal performance come out of an artificial intelligence tool.

Short words, long words

The first thing that changes is the size of the words.

English is full of monosyllables. Pain, truth, door, night, hide, fall. One syllable, one blow. In Spanish a word normally has two or three syllables, and plenty of the ones I use in my lyrics have four or five: reclamación, desenmascarado, garantía, tentación. That means far more English words fit into the same bar than Spanish ones. Or, put the other way round: in Spanish I need more room to say the same thing.

You can hear it clearly in «Gatekeeping». The lyric is built out of tiny, almost telegraphic phrases: «You measure pain / with a ruler, / not with truth.» Nine words, almost all of one syllable, over three lines. If I translate it into Spanish, the idea survives but the rhythm breaks: mides el dolor con una regla y no con la verdad is already an after-dinner remark, not a sharp knock.

So in English I tend to cut, and in Spanish I tend to add. In Spanish I end up with long lists, proper names and a second sentence to finish off the first. In English I end up with the skeleton. With English I think about the gap. With Spanish, about what fills it.

Rhyming with vowels or with consonants

The second thing that changes is rhyme, and here Spanish has the advantage.

A huge number of Spanish words end in a vowel, and there are only five vowels. That makes rhyming relatively easy, especially if you settle for assonance, the kind of rhyme that only needs the vowels to match from the last stressed syllable onwards. Pecho and derecho rhyme completely; tatuado and guapo only share their vowels, but they still sound like family. Popular tradition, from the old ballads to copla, has been living off that for centuries.

English has many more vowel sounds, many more words ending in consonants and a spelling that looks nothing like the pronunciation. Rhyming well is harder, which is why English-language pop lives on rhymes that nearly rhyme and on the same old pairs: heart and apart, night and light, fire and higher. In «Boys Like Us» I accepted that without any embarrassment: hide with pride, fall with tall. They are chorus rhymes, predictable on purpose, the kind a crowd sings back without thinking.

The odd thing is that in English I let myself skip rhyme more often. The verses of «Gatekeeping» barely rhyme at all: they hold up on repetition, «You say», «You say», «You say», and on the title word opening every line of the chorus. In my own language, an unrhymed line sounds to me like prose that stopped halfway. In English it sounds like a statement. I suppose it comes down to the ear: I grew up listening to songs in English paying more attention to the sound than to the rhyme, and that left me freer in that language than in my own.

Humour needs a postcode

The third thing that changes is humour, because the humour in my lyrics is made of very specific things.

In «Mi novio de Albacete» ("My Boyfriend from Albacete") the joke isn't a clever line, it's a pile-up of details. The boyfriend is from Albacete, a provincial town in La Mancha, and not from just anywhere. He gets himself onto a dating app the first chance he has. And the chorus ends on a scene that still makes me laugh every time I reread it: «Has viajado cinco horas para dejar una nota / ¡Que ha acabado en el retrete!» You travelled five hours to leave a note, and it ended up in the toilet. The line works because it has a town, a dating app, a journey and a toilet. It is postcode humour.

If I move it into English, either I keep Albacete, which means nothing outside Spain, or I swap it for an English town and the song stops being mine. The same goes for the Canarian gofio in «No quiero otro novio cojín» or the neighbour shrieking at the funeral in «Eso es lefa». My humour comes from a map and from a particular way of complaining, and the English I write doesn't have that map. My English is a language without a neighbourhood. It is good for the universal things: night, pride, loneliness, calm. For everyday detail, which is where jokes live, I need the language I do my shopping in.

Modesty changes language

The fourth thing is the one that surprised me most when I looked over the catalogue properly: I am far more modest in English.

In Spanish I have written sexually explicit lyrics without a second thought. Some titles give you fair warning from the cover, and in some songs the explicitness is the joke itself, like the ending of «Eso es lefa», where a funeral ends with the neighbour screaming the song's title in front of the coffin. That kind of grotesque exaggeration, somewhere between old Spanish farce and Almodóvar, comes to me in Spanish completely naturally. It is the language of lifelong swearing and outrageous table talk, where obscenity can also be affectionate.

In the songs I have entirely in English, on the other hand, the explicit almost vanishes, and the furthest things usually go is a kiss. In «Boys Like Us» the boys kiss «like fire», dance, put on heels and refuse to hide. In «The Great Depression» there is enormous desire, but it is held back, stopping at «not quite a kiss». And «Holy Stillness» is almost a lullaby: «The world exhales, the dark turns kind».

I have a theory. Swearwords in your mother tongue burn; in a learned language they burn much less. Plenty of people who speak several languages will say fuck without blinking and then hesitate over a proper swearword in their own language in front of their mother. When I write, that takes me somewhere odd: because explicitness in English doesn't burn me, it doesn't amuse me either. There is no fun in being outrageous in a language that doesn't outrage you. So in English I go tender, solemn or melancholy, and I save the shamelessness for Spanish, where it still has an edge.

One Spanish for two shores

When I write in Spanish, who am I writing for? I ask myself that a lot, because the people who listen to me are spread across Spain, the rest of Europe and Latin America.

The industry knows a solution well: neutral Spanish, the variety used in a lot of dubbing, manuals and adverts aimed at the whole continent. It avoids vosotros, the plural "you" that only Spain uses, it avoids regional swearwords, and it avoids words that mean one thing in Madrid and another in Buenos Aires or Mexico City. Everyone understands it and nobody is offended by it. And, for what I do, it tastes of nothing.

I write in castizo, the street Spanish of Madrid. Not out of stubbornness, but because my songs have a narrator, and that narrator lives in Madrid. He says currando for working, tío for any bloke and coñazo for a pain in the neck, as in «Mi novio de Albacete», and he tells people where to go with an os that in Mexico would sound like a period drama. Strip all that out to make it sound neutral and he ends up like a TV character whose dubbing has been redone: you no longer know where he is from.

What I do is choose my local colour carefully. Some local words shut the door and others leave it ajar. A word only understood in one Madrid neighbourhood shuts out someone listening in Lima. A recognisable situation, told in words from here, is understood everywhere even if the odd word slips past. The ex who travels for hours to leave a note exists in Monterrey just as much as in Getafe. So does the nosy neighbour. Latin American listeners are completely used to hearing songs from Spain full of strange words, just as we in Spain have spent our whole lives humming along to boleros, rancheras and reggaeton full of words nobody ever explained to us. There is an unspoken deal between the two shores: I lend you my words, you lend me yours, and we both work them out from context.

In «Marica chill» there are two lines that almost work as a motto for this: «Hablo Spanglish con quien quiera escuchar / Y si no entienden, pues lo van a gozar». I speak Spanglish with anyone who wants to listen, and if they don't understand, they'll enjoy it anyway. Not understanding everything doesn't stop you enjoying it. Sometimes it is part of the pleasure.

For Europe the question is different. Someone listening in Berlin, Lisbon or Amsterdam often doesn't speak Spanish, or only half does, and there English works as a way in. A song like «Boys Like Us» is understood straight away on any dance floor on the continent. And then, perhaps, someone gets curious about the others, the ones with Albacete in the title.

How each language sounds in the machine

That leaves the technical side, the one I get asked about most.

I write the lyric, and then the tool generates the music and the vocal performance from it, following what I ask for. In my experience, English comes out more fluently. It feels as if the tool is on home ground: short phrases fit the bar, the word stress lands where it should and the vowels stretch naturally at the ends of lines. It is as if English-language pop were its mother tongue, which makes sense when you think about how many songs in English exist in the world.

Spanish is harder for it, and castizo harder still. There are takes where a word comes out stressed on the wrong syllable, where a long line tumbles over itself because it doesn't fit the bar, or where everything sounds like Spanish from nowhere, neither Madrid nor Bogotá: an accidental neutral Spanish I never asked for. The z and the s, the intonation of an ironic question, the sting of a shouted «¡tu ojete!» in a chorus: all of that has to be fought for.

The fight takes several forms. I rewrite. I swap a word for one with the stress in the right place. I split a line in two. I stretch vowels by hand in the lyric itself, like the «noooo» in «Trabalenguas para meter la lengua», to show where I want the syllable held. I repeat a chorus until the tool treats it as a chorus. I generate several versions and pick the one that best respects what the line means, and sometimes none of them will do and I go back to the notebook. It is directing work, and in Spanish it takes me longer than in English.

But I wouldn't trade Spanish for convenience. If I wrote only in English because the machine handles it better, I would be letting the tool choose the language of my songs for me. And language is the very last thing I would hand over.

What I carry from one language to the other

From English I have brought back pruning. Now, in Spanish, I ask myself whether the second sentence adds anything or just repeats the first in a different hat.

From Spanish I have taken trust in repetition into English. Copla repeats, the old ballads repeat, proverbs repeat, and I have learned not to be afraid of saying the same thing five times if it weighs a little more each time. «Gatekeeping» owes more to that tradition than you might think.

And from both I have learned that each language has its own temperature. English is my language of calm, of pride said out loud and of melancholy with its coat on. Spanish is my language of scandal, of detail and of affection with a bit of bite. When an idea arrives, I almost always know which of the two it has to live in before I know what it is going to say.

All the lyrics, in both languages, are in the lyrics archive, and the songs are on Spotify and Deezer and can be downloaded for free on this site. If you only speak one of the two languages, here is a game: listen first to a song in the one you don't understand. Before you look up a translation, try to guess whether it is a joke, a sorrow or a declaration of love. From the way the words sound, you can almost always tell.