Cuando Nadie Me Ve

It's the third song I've made with Gemma Isasi and the most exposed of the three. The lyrics are hers, the voice too, and they're about something that rarely gets sung this plainly: what a day feels like from the inside when anxiety is in charge. My role was the same as always with her: to hold her words up without softening them and without scoring them like a tragedy.

It isn't a song about overcoming anything. It tells of the days you can't leave the house, the mirror you don't recognise yourself in, the thoughts that won't let you sleep. And in the middle of all that there's one very specific, very humble request: that nobody try to fix her or judge her, just that she be heard. To me, that's the bravest thing in the lyric.

The production is minimal on purpose. When someone tells you something like this, the last thing they need is an orchestra on top. I kept the voice very close, almost bare, with a pulse underneath that sounds like a clock, the tick-tock of a head that won't switch off. And even though it sounds fragile, I don't read it as a defeated song. There's a line near the end where breathing the next day is put forward as a small way of resisting. It isn't a triumph. It's carrying on. Sometimes that's enough.

Of the three songs we've made together, this is the one that gave me the most pause. It isn't about a pretty emotion. It's written from inside anxiety, the kind that sits down next to you and talks so quietly you end up agreeing with it. Putting music to something like that without wrecking it was most of the job.

That's why I produced it almost in the dark: a pulse ticking like a clock or a racing heart, Gemma's voice up close, and little else. A big arrangement would have sounded like playing it down. I wanted the tremble to be heard when it's there, and the silences when they come. I wanted the song to breathe at the same broken rhythm as the person singing it.

And there's something in the lyric I think should be said louder: it doesn't ask to be fixed. It dodges the usual everything's going to be fine and stays with something quieter, still being here even when no one can see you. The only victory it allows itself is breathing again the next day, and it frames that as a small act of standing up. It felt important not to dress that up. Just to hold it and let it be heard.