Naná / La Siesta

Naná / La Siesta is not a song that will play on the radio nor one that people will hum on the street. It is a fragment from Novela, that demo that Fito Páez recorded in 1988 and remained there, like an unfinished sketch. It lasted barely 41 seconds, but within that time, two intertwining piano pieces fit seamlessly, as if they were the draft of something bigger. What’s curious is that, although it never became part of a film, those notes ended up being seeds: three of its themes were later reworked under different names and on other albums, as if time had polished them into recognizable songs.

The story behind these couple of minutes is that of a project that never took off. Fito was working on the music for a short film, but the funds vanished before it could be recorded. What remained was this demo of 14 tracks, where Naná / La Siesta appears as a quick note, without pretensions. There is no elaborate production or complex arrangements: just piano and a melody that floats between melancholy and playfulness. The interesting part is how, years later, two of those initial notes —As de Poker and Novela— became hits within his discography, proving that what sometimes seems like waste can end up being the skeleton of something more solid.