A meeting of great poets, full of freedom and with a clandestine flavor. Not because of the prohibition, but because of the vindication of the word, exposed in such a naked way and enjoyed with such delight that it bordered on the pornographic. Colombian singer-songwriter Charles Palace (Pala) made it clear on Wednesday night in the Galileo Galilei room that his devotion to verse, to metaphor and to the sonnets that others championed in the streets of Madrid in the Golden Age, would be the main keys that would mark a unique and unforgettable concert.
Because Pala’s songs are like that, simple and unrepeatable. Like a kiss well given. Seasoned all of them with the rhythms that, according to him, he listened to on the radio while his mother cooked in Medellín (Colombia) and from which he has not been able to escape: the tango, the son, the bolero, the ballad… But without too many artifices so as not to mislead us from what is most important to him: the text. An offline refuge to an excessively online world.
In his concert he handled the times with skill. He started off calmly, with one of his latest compositions, ‘Ponme’, which somehow introduces him and places him before the public: “Put me in your dovecote or in your window. That I will be the lamp that I have always been. One that only illuminates with your flame.”
An almost mathematical control of time and metrics that come to him, he says, from his past as a surgeon. Carlos Palacio tells us that he abandoned medicine after assisting a pregnant woman in childbirth. He thought it was too much responsibility to have a person’s life in his hands as soon as he arrived in the world. So he decided to accompany people from another plane. Simply, with his lyrics and his songs.
And so it was done with the public of Galileo. With music, dialogue, anecdotes and verses. Little by little the night began to light up. Both with his guitar and reciting, only with his voice, one of his collections of poems, “La vocation del oar”, with which he won the José Espronceda National Poetry Prize. “The inhospitable leaf is traced by a shy child in a bucolic town”Pala said.
He reviewed songs from his nine recording works as “Love Comes First”, “And breath” either “Hang up the habits”, in which he analyzes, almost as a sociologist, the romantic feeling and the human contradictions, with an ironic and elegantly scoundrel tone. It didn’t take more than half an hour until he wanted to surround himself with friends. In an organic way rather than choreographed, writers like sonia del campo and Juan Miguel Portillo, members of the Brotherhood of the Word, which he founded in Spain four years ago. Both accommodated his poetics in the middle of the song ‘Shine’, which Pala defends together with Pedro Guerra on his latest album, “El siglo del loro”. His lyrics have been respected so much in Spain and Latin America, that the list of collaborators is endless. Juanes, Rozalen, martha gomez, Coke Meshandhe Kanka, javier ruibal either fito paez.
They were not the only poets who heightened emotions on that night, which evoked, at least for the undersigned, that time when singer-songwriters were rockstars who filled stadiums. Along with Palacio was also the multifaceted Bernard Engel or the poet María Esteban, as young as she was mature on a literary level: “Life is not as elastic as it is painted. It would be naive to believe that it reaches everywhere. If anything, it is a pale liquid, with protein lumps, like a Portuguese broth”, he reeled off along with the chords of the Colombian.
And in the end, two sublime moments: the first, the one in which he starred with his friend and admirer Jorge Drexler. The Uruguayan, surrounded by friends and comfortable in his Madrid after months of a tour as successful as it was a marathon, borrowed Palacio’s guitar and sang with him his mythical “Milonga of the Jewish Moor”. A topic that inspired you Joaquin Sabina and in this kind of generosity, now it was time to share with his comrade from Medellín. And they sang it together, almost in a whisper. Generating an unrepeatable atmosphere.
The second, the song with which he was about to close, “Blonde like Monroe”, in which your partner, Mercy Monsalve he accompanied him with dance and threw verses as stark as they were erotic in his face.
Thus ended a night where the power of the word prevailed. Where the text, well articulated, acquired that power to stir, move and even heal. “Songs can achieve fabulous results for which they were not even considered. In earlier times there were those who wrote to change the world. I do not consider it. I just I write what comes to me And it is true that sometimes small miracles occur”, Carlos Palacio explained to us after that night… or after that little miracle.
Source: Lasexta
Bruce is a talented author and journalist with a passion for entertainment . He currently works as a writer at the 247 News Agency, where he has established himself as a respected voice in the industry.
