Un monton de estrellas lyrics full#

His 25-year-old stepson was killed instantly and his wife injured. One evening when he wanted to get home after a concert, the car he was in collided late at night with a tractor-trailer. He had just played open air concerts to vast crowds in Cuba's 20 largest cities and to 100,000 in Havana. In 2001 he had become an 'Illustrious Son of Colombia' and in May 2002 he was made Cubadisco's Artist of the Year.

The world seemed to be his oyster and he was loving every minute of it. He worked on songs in his head until he could sing them perfectly and then worked on them with his guitar and then his band. My songs are like little novels that speak the truth and I think that's why people take them to heart.'Īnd so chart-topper Un Montón De Estrellas (A Mountain Of Stars), telling how idiotic love can make you, how painful it can be and yet how much it is worth, turned out to have been written about a relationship that had ended three years earlier.

As he told me recently in Essen, Germany, after a concert for the 2000 delegates at the Womex world music fair, 'I compose about real experiences that happen to me or someone I know. Like everything he sang, all his songs were his own. for I love the way the zorzal sings in the mountains.' Cleverly, it included word-play evoking Afro-Cuban religious beliefs and the wellspring of ancient popular poetry. The lyrics of his famous song Guajiro Natural amount to his testimony: 'I'm an ordinary bloke from the wild hills/ I know my position and place/ I come from the yoke of the ox cart/ bringing the smell of charcoal and the countryside/ I'll get on a plane if I have to/ But I'll always come back.

Un monton de estrellas lyrics full#

He created wonderfully lively guarachas marrying rhyming verses with choruses to Afro-Cuban rhythms that were full of swing. Montañez was a natural poet, composing intuitively using the old Spanish improvised décima verse forms beloved of Cuban country music, and particularly fostered by the tobacco farmers of his region, Pinar del Rio. Montañez's radio-friendly music made him an instant hit all over Cuba and almost immediately in Colombia, his fame soon spreading throughout Central America and the Caribbean, where everyone seemed to learn the lyrics to his catchy song overnight. He struck lucky, or, as he said himself, the saints shone down on him, when French record producer and label boss José da Silva, the man who found Cesaria Evora in Cape Verde, was bewitched by Montañez's sincere, uncluttered country style and the genuine musicality of his small group with their zingy guitars and percussion.īefore they knew it they were in the Abdala studios in Havana recording for Da Silva's Lusafrica label. Until 1999 he was a farm-worker who sang in the evenings and at weekends at the local Hotel La Moka with a group of family and friends, who had played together all their lives.