Un invitado VIP cortando cebolla: tears with an excuse

If you've ever been caught crying and said it was the onion, this song will feel very close to home. Un invitado VIP cortando cebolla (A VIP Guest Chopping Onion) is a total drama, with vowels stretched out to infinity, and at the same time one of the most ridiculous and endearing excuses I've ever come up with.

The story is that of someone who falls again. After four years as a VIP guest in heaven, he returns to hell: to dark loneliness, to anxiety, to modern liquors. The lyrics deliver it with copla-style drama, stretching every word as if the sorrow wouldn't fit into a single syllable. «Tu ausenciaaaa» (your absenceeee), «mi decadenciaaaa» (my decadenceeee). There's something of the wounded diva in it that I love.

But the song is also very concrete, very local. The protagonist arrives drunk at the Sauna Paraíso, goes back to chemsex sessions to see if he can finally forget his ex. It's a relapse told without moralising and without hiding anything, with the honesty of someone who knows exactly what he's doing and why.

The only idiot

And there's a moment that is beautiful and sad at once: he doesn't want to be the only idiot who, in the depths of winter, paints butterflies in a notebook, shut away in his room. Nor the only one who doesn't score on a night like that. That mix of tenderness and rawness is very PLANETA GAYFOLK. Sensitivity and sex live together in the same verse without apologising to each other.

The ending is brilliant. If anyone sees him crying through the streets of Madrid again, nobody should worry: «me acabo de hacer una ensalada y he estado cortando cebolla» (I've just made myself a salad and I've been chopping onion). The excuse is repeated over and over until it becomes absurd, because we all know there's no salad.

I dedicate it to anyone who has had a relapse, of whatever kind, and to whoever still hasn't got over their ex even though they swear they have. Listen to it on a Sunday afternoon, one of those heavy ones. Or while you're chopping onion for real, so you've got an alibi.

The full lyrics are below. Listen on Spotify