Luz De Estrellas Muertas

This song has a birth date and a birthplace: a San Juan night, Spain's Midsummer Eve, once the beach had gone quiet. Lying on the sand under a clean sky, I told a friend something that has always stunned me: some of the stars we were looking at no longer exist, and their light is still arriving. I wasn't writing anything; it was just a calm conversation. But the idea stayed.

What I did with that image is about time and about how we look: almost everything we see, of stars, of people, of ourselves, is light that left a long time ago and arrives late. Old versions still shining as if they were the present, and the question of what we do with that light. The song takes it to the terrain of love: two people floating outside of time, where what they used to be stops mattering, and one final idea that I'm fond of: that if it all goes dark someday, what's left of us should be what's left of those stars, a signal still travelling.

The sound has more movement than calm. I put in a punchier percussion and electronic sounds that don't let the song sit still, and right now I'm trying out a more processed mix, more effects, while making sure the feeling doesn't get lost along the way. It's a short, direct track: it comes in, says what it has to say, and leaves. It doesn't linger, but it stays in your head.

The lyrics happen inside that image, not in front of it: two people floating weightless, no floor and no sky, in a place where time breaks the moment they touch. The vocabulary is all space: light, signals, expansion. But what it's about is very much down here: the moment someone goes right through you and everything before stops mattering.

The title might sound dark; the song is the opposite. The dead stars are there for what they teach about time: their light keeps arriving long after, and it's us who decide what to do with it. In the song that idea becomes almost a promise: even if it all goes out one day, something of this will keep travelling. That's why my favourite line is the one about echoes that refuse to fade. To me it isn't a sad line, it's a stubborn one.

Two things live together in there: I'm still writing and singing the way I always have, but this time I put more electronic, more worked-on sounds into it. I don't think of it as a contrast, it's just how it's coming out these days. And that part, trying out new sounds without losing the way I sound, is what I'm enjoying most about this song.