Hace Tres Inviernos

Of the songs we've made together, this is the one that lands the final turn best. It starts where heartbreak songs usually end — the memory, the absence, wanting them back — but it doesn't stay there: in the last stretch, she understands that the one she's calling out to isn't the person who left, but the love that hasn't arrived yet.

I was keen not to sing it with bitterness or with 'I'm better off without you' euphoria. Gemma pitches it at a very hard middle ground: she admits she did the right thing by asking for the truth, and at the same time doesn't hide that it cost her dearly. That balance — knowing you were right and that it still hurts — is, to me, what keeps the song from sounding like a slogan on a mug.

In the production I went for that warm-winter contrast: slow tempo, few elements, a bed that keeps you warm while the lyric talks about cold. I kept it short on purpose, with no extra choruses — the whole story fits into three and a half minutes, and stretching it would have betrayed how lean it is. It ends in December, looking ahead; I like that it doesn't close on the wound, that it leaves a door ajar.