Home · Songs · Joaquín Sabina · A mis cuarenta y diez
From album
19 días y 500 noches
Joaquín Sabina · 1999 · Track 6
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The story behind
The song A mis cuarenta y diez is not just another track in Joaquín Sabina's repertoire: its melody carries that air between melancholic and playful, as if it were capturing time right when one turns an age that isn't round. The title itself sounds like a joke with nostalgia, as if the author had decided to celebrate his fiftieth birthday —because forty and ten add up to fifty— with a song that, instead of lamenting the passing of years, turns them into raw material for a tale full of irony and tenderness. The lyrics, packed with everyday references and unexpected twists, play with the idea of turning fifty without losing the grace of someone who still marvels at life's small details.
Recorded in Madrid between the late nineties and early two thousands, A mis cuarenta y diez is part of the album 19 días y 500 noches, a double album that Sabina had to defend to his record label: they asked him to reduce it to a single disc due to cost and because, according to them, the market wasn't used to long formats. The result was a work of over seventy minutes, where each song seems to have its own rhythm and personality. This track in particular, with its seven minutes and eleven seconds, benefits from a production that blends the rawness of guitars with arrangements reminiscent of seventies soul, something not coincidental when looking at the credentials of those responsible: Enrique Berro García and Alejo Stivel, the latter a former member of Tequila, contributed nuances that distance the song from the purely acoustic to give it a more organic feel, almost as if it were played live. The mix, handled by Brett Rader, reinforces that sense of immediacy, as if the song had been captured in a single take, without studio retouches that might strip it of its freshness.