A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to attend what, I believe, is the best concert I have ever been to in my life. I bought the tickets months in advance (as one has to do nowadays, in the age of Ticketmaster Wars) and waited impatiently for the day to arrive. In the meantime, I planned my outfit, listened to the album on repeat for days at a time, memorised the lyrics, and overanalysed the messages hidden within the songs. I flew all the way from Brussels, where I’m based, to my hometown of Madrid just to see the performance. Despite all this anticipation, nothing could have prepared me for the avalanche of feelings I experienced while standing in the middle of a crowd, looking up to Rosalía taking the stage. How was it that this artist was able to convey her experiences and emotions in a way that was so relatable to me, and to all the other people in the audience?
As someone born and raised in Spain, like Rosalía, I not only understand the language she sings in, but also the cultural elements that shape her art. I recognise the jota she dances and the flamenco vocal flourishes she showcases in some of her songs; even though I am not religious, I understand the Catholic influence that colours her new album. Listening to it makes me especially emotional because it is deeply rooted in Spanish cultural identity and collective imagery. It came out just as I moved to a new country, and allowed me to reconnect with parts of my identity that only resurface when I’m back in Spain. I have come to realise that, despite feeling very confident in my second language, there is a whole array of gestures, cultural references and phrases that inevitably get lost in translation. There’s a part of me that my partner and my friends, the support system I have built for myself, simply cannot understand, because my full personality has no way of existing outside the realm of my mother tongue. So, sometimes, when I need to connect with my roots but know I’m thousands of kilometers away, I turn to music. When I need it most, music allows me to appreciate and reconnect with my cultural identity in ways I didn’t always realise I craved, and Rosalía’s songs allow me to do just that.
In her most recent album, Lux, Rosalía sings in 13 languages. At first, I thought this might partly explain its reach: that so many people could see themselves reflected in her words. However, that explanation quickly felt incomplete. Much of the album remains anchored in Spanish, and the multilingual moments are brief rather than dominant. Yet, listeners from completely different linguistic and cultural backgrounds still connect deeply with it. In an interview with Zane Lowe, Rosalía said that her aim in composing and singing in multiple languages was to explore the diversity of human experience and emotion, and to make her music feel more deeply rooted in that complexity.
Affective responses to music are undeniably universal, despite the nuance that underpins each person’s individual experience. The question, then, becomes less about which language is used for the lyrics, and more about what is communicated beyond the words themselves. The answer, it turns out, is rooted in the way our brains work: music triggers multiple regions of our brain simultaneously, making it so that even the simplest of tunes can engage the limbic system, which is the group of brain structures in charge of emotional regulation and memory formation. That is why music evokes feelings and memories in a way language alone often cannot, because many of our responses to it occur before we can consciously reflect on them. Music plays with the tension between expectations and resolution, inciting our brain to predict what will happen next, and leading to cognitive satisfaction and emotional peaks when there are unexpected harmonic shifts. There is something almost paradoxical about it: we understand music most deeply precisely when it does not call for an explanation.
Music bypasses explanation and goes straight to recognition. A melody, a rhythm or a vocal inflection can evoke emotions that feel intensely personal, even when they are shared by thousands of people at the same time. Perhaps this is why live music feels so overwhelming. When I was standing in that arena listening to Rosalía, surrounded by strangers singing along to the same songs, I was struck by how different our reasons for being there must have been. Many people may have connected with the religious imagery of Lux, others with its reflections on love, grief or belonging. Maybe some of them shared my longing for reinforcing my cultural identity. It is highly likely that quite a few did not speak Spanish at all. Yet, for those two hours, none of that seemed to matter. We were responding to the same emotional cues, carried not only through language but through melody, rhythm and artistic performance. What felt deeply personal also became collective, creating a sense of understanding that transcended the cultural and linguistic barriers that separated us. Perhaps that is the real power of music: not to erase our differences, but to make us feel understood in spite of them.
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