What Music Sounds Like When You Change Languages

How It Works (and Why It Doesn’t)—Thanksgiving Special

What follows is the part I didn’t include in a Medium article I wrote this week for

Kevin Alexander

’s publication, The Riff—the extended cut.

Not music theory, not linguistics, not academia. Just the mechanics underneath what I’ve been feeling since landing in Spain.

Because this isn’t just a story about Spanish vs. English.

It’s a story about two different systems of constructing lyrics—and what happens emotionally and intellectually when you finally step out of the only one you ever knew.

But first—a Black Friday deal. Officially the day after Thanksgiving in the United States, Black Friday has been happening all month in Spain, if you go by signs in store windows.

For the next few days, all How It Works (and Why It Doesn’t) subscriptions are 50% off.

And if you pay in euros—which helps me build the euro-denominated life I’m writing about—you get 30 days free. After your initial subscription processes, I’ll tack on a month. So a monthly plan gets a month free and a 12-month subscription becomes a 13-month subscription.

No gimmicks, no countdown clock. Just a way to say thank you and to bring more of you into the work I’m building here in Spain. To get the deal, follow this link or the button below.

At the beginning of the year, I told the story of mistaking a Spanish songwriter for Bob Dylan in a bar:

Turns out, I was not listening to Dylan.

Instead, the owner of this bar was playing Amor a Traición (Love Betrayal), a Spanish pop band from San Sebastián, active between 1985 and 1997. A guy named Rafael Berrio was Amor a Traición’s lead singer. Berrio, who passed away in 2020, was a friend of the bar owner.

And — let me tell you — he’s freaking incredible. Solo, and with Amor a Traición.

So incredible, in fact, that Una canción de mala muerte has become my most-played not only Spanish song, but overall song on Spotify.

Which got me thinking as my Spanish improves: either Spanish music is secretly the greatest music on Earth, or I’ve just unlocked a form of joyful discovery that makes everything sound new again. And that feeling—the one I had the first time Springsteen, Petty, or Elliott Smith ever really landed for me—is exactly what I’m chasing here.

This is me, pursuing that feeling.

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A quick note here, because it’s easy to oversimplify this stuff. It’s not that English music is narrative and Spanish music is emotional-vibes-only. That’s not true, and anyone who listens even a little knows it.

Spain and the Spanish-speaking world are full of storytellers—Joan Manuel Serrat and Joaquín Sabina are the first my Spanish instructor introduced me to—people as direct and narrative as Springsteen ever was.

Berrio also fits here. There’s a reason why I mistook him for Dylan that goes beyond the similar sound of their voices. Berrio’s not abstract. He’s structured. His writing has logic and intention. Una canción de mala muerte is closer to Leonard Cohen or even Petty by way of San Sebastián—calm, clipped, understated poetry with a thesis behind it.

What’s different isn’t that there’s narrative. Even when two writers are doing the same kind of storytelling, the language changes the feel of it. That’s what I find fascinating.

Obviously, I am attracted to a certain type of music—songwriters who create killer sounds with strong melodies—so it makes sense to focus our systems comparison on how being new to Spanish makes the music hit differently for me. And to consider that maybe there’s something to all of this beyond just me being an early Spanish learner.

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Here’s the part I didn’t go into on Medium—the How It Works piece. The system underneath the feeling. It’s the kind of stuff I miss thinking and writing about. When I first discovered Elliott Smith, I spent countless hours on songmeanings.net and other platforms geeking out over this shit.

I’ve spent my whole life listening to a certain kind of songwriter: Springsteen, Petty, Elliott, Brian Fallon (with or without Gaslight Anthem), Mike Ness (with and without Social Distortion). People who build songs out of character(s), narrative, and an uncanny ability to distill complicated emotions into just a few words.

And even when the music shifts—even when I get into bands like The New Pornographers, The Decemberists, or Shout Out Louds—the attraction is the same. Short English words. Hard consonants. Clipped phrasing. Incredible storytelling. A kind of working-class and/or tragic and, quite often, hopeful love song frankness that feels like someone talking to you at the bar at 11 p.m.

Spanish is built differently. Even before I understand every word, it hits differently. Maybe it’s the vowel endings—sometimes difficult to get used to for a guy from the Northeast US.

I’d love your thoughts in the comments.

Anyhow—a few examples:

Classic Springsteen bluntness:

I’m just tired and bored with myself.

Spanish softens it automatically:

Estoy tan cansado y hastiado de mí.

Elliott Smith’s ambiguity is gone—super literal—in Spanish:

Everything means nothing to me. → Todo significa nada para mí.

Petty’s simplicity doesn’t translate literally:

Most things I worry about never happen anyway. → La mayoría de las cosas que me preocupan nunca pasan de todos modos.

Way too literal—I know because that’s exactly how I translated it before realizing how stiff it sounded.

I did a mini-Spanish lesson with that line and tried to translate Petty the way a Spanish songwriter might. Not word-for-word, but feeling-for-feeling. I ended up with:

Lo que me quita el sueño, casi nunca sucede.
(What keeps me up at night almost never happens.)

It probably works in English too—if Petty hadn’t already conditioned us with his now-iconic line.

It’s also a line I can hear coming out of Berrio’s mouth in my head.

This is the only real “system” I care about here: How the shape of a language changes what a songwriter can do inside a three-minute song.

None of this means English songwriters can’t sound smooth or that Spanish writers never sound straightforward. Berrio proves that fast. Switching languages reveals what one language naturally strengthens and what another naturally strips away. Petty’s line works because English lets him be blunt without sounding simplistic. My little Spanish version works because Spanish rewards still direct, but a slightly more poetic phrasing that circles the emotion instead of hitting you directly in the face with it.

It’s the same craft, just built with different materials.

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Ever since I covered the evolution and inner workings of Pandora in 2013, I have been somewhat obsessed with the songs we skip and the ones we put on repeat—and why.

I’m not here to decide whether Spanish or English is better—that’s a losing argument —but to figure out why I love this song so much. I also want to explore why a Spanish cover of Springsteen made me hear a song I’ve known for 40 years like it was brand-new.

Language—especially when you’re just learning (discovering) it—adds layers to how you understand and interpret words in your new and native tongue. Every once in a while, it exposes something you didn’t even know you were listening for.

And now feels like the right moment to share the song that started all of this. Not explain it. Not merely to translate it. Just let you hear it the way I first heard it—with curiosity and openness.

If you translate Una canción de mala muerte literally into English, it dies on the page.

The poetry collapses. The phrasing stiffens. The mood evaporates.

It’s a skip.

To illustrate, here’s what Google Translate spits out from just a few lines:

It neither condemns nor saves,
it does not show the path that shortens,
it neither waits nor loses its calm,
and it is written that it does not matter,
it is only a song of bad death.

I could do better than that today, and I still struggle with small talk on the streets of Valencia.

In Spanish, those lyrics are elegant and melancholic without melodrama. The repetition (“no condena ni salva / no enseña / ni espera”) has a rhythm that you just can’t structure the same way in English. That’s the difference between literal accuracy and poetic accuracy—something that Google tries, and fails, to account for.

This also happens in reverse, as I’ve discovered via countless plays on Spotify with the lyrics (las letras) on and frequent visits to Google Translate.

Look at Elliott Smith. Strip the amazing music and melody away, translate him into Spanish, and you lose the not-as-composed-as-you-appear, fragile-fall-apart quality that makes Elliott Elliott.

Same with Springsteen. A literal translation of Born to Run becomes a manual for troubleshooting an engine while practicing Spanish. Thunder Road turns into language learning homework:

The screen door slams → La puerta mosquitera

Laugh out loud.

But Dancing in the Dark survives. Because the great Colombian musician, Juanes, nailed the cover. He approached it the way novel translators do: not as a puzzle but as a re-creation.

The more I listen to Berrio and Juanes, the more I realize that this isn’t just about translation. It’s about interpretation. About how voices and words in another language make you think more critically about your own, both in general and in good songwriting.

It made me realize that Spanish music or lyrics aren’t better than the American riffs and words I love. They’re just different because the languages are distinctly different. And that the best songwriters in the world have a way with words in their own languages that defies and doesn’t really require comparison (unless it’s for learning and discovery purposes!).

Plus, in English, I know too much.

I know Springsteen’s biography and the characters he writes about. In many ways, he and some of them are me.

I know what Petty meant in interviews when he talked about why the band needed to record live in the studio.

I have a tattoo of Brian Fallon lyrics—Playin’ melancholy songs/That somehow made us feel a whole lot better—because I know they’re the perfect distillation of how Elliott Smith makes people feel.

I know the cultural and emotional weight of these and so many other American (and, in some cases, British) English lyrics. I have the history and a full grasp and command (pretty much!) of my language.

Spanish takes pretty much all of that away.

When I listen to Berrio—even once I (pretty much!!) understand the lyrics—I’m not bringing decades of English-language meaning with me. I hear so much else—sound, melody, phrasing, intent. I feel the song’s musical and lyrical cadence, before meaning obscures those elements.

It’s why the Juanes cover of a tune that has been horribly covered so many times (I won’t name some otherwise solid names) works so well. He doesn’t translate Bruce and call it a day or try to steal the guy’s voice. He reimagines him—in Spanish.

Good translation is typically not literal. You resist, then learn this fast as an English speaker studying Spanish. You want impact and meaning, not the exact words.

Petty would understand this better than most.

He delivered lines like:

• “She couldn’t help thinkin’ that there was a little more to life somewhere else.”

Same with Elliott Smith: “For someone half as smart, you’d be a work for art.”

Translate that literally into Spanish—Para alguien la mitad de inteligente serías una obra de arte—and it stops being the perfect, heartbreaking backhanded compliment you need a little bit of Elliott’s story to understand truly.

But written and sung the right way in any language, it hits.

So, is Spanish music better? Of course not. It’s just different.

But it does reset my ears. And, like so many parts of moving abroad, it reminds me that if you close yourself off to other cultures—their words, their phrasings, their ways of expressing emotion and just doing life—you limit what you’re able to experience, feel, and understand. Individually and collectively.

America welcomed the British Invasion because it could decode the lyrics. White kids adopted rap and hip-hop for the same reason. They knew the language even if they didn’t live the reality.

But music in Spanish?

Setting reggaeton aside for a minute, Spanish-language songwriting has, for decades, mostly stayed inside Latino communities in the U.S. I wish I had taken it seriously when I lived in LA. The largest ethnic group in the country has always made, and still makes, some of the most emotionally rich, melodically adventurous music around—and I barely noticed.

I would have come to Spain with a better base—from Mexican artists and tropical music via places like Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic—to inform the sounds I’m hearing now, which often originate in Spain and travel to South America.

Because once you‘ve spent decades with the music you know—for me, Springsteen, Petty, Elliott, Gaslight Anthem—you stop being surprised. You continue to appreciate and admire your favorites, but you rarely, if ever, get those holy-shit-what-is-this moments.

Moving to Spain and listening to Spanish gives that back to me.

Not because it’s exotic or better, but because it rewires the pathways my brain built in English over 40 years. It brings back the feeling of hearing music again, not relying on shortcuts of memory.

There’s no nostalgia. There’s less biography. Just sound, cadence, phrasing, and emotion—before meaning takes over.

And that might be the universal truth here: Great songwriters in any language don’t just write words. They write—(thank you, Billy Joel)—states of mind. They get under your skin and in your head in ways that survive translation, or resist it entirely.

Listening to Spanish music doesn’t make English music worse. It just reminds me of what it feels like to hear something new again.