Silvana Estrada - Como Un Pájaro

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Hrishikesh Hirway. This episode of Song Exploder is brought to you by Booking.com. My wife and I have been thinking about visiting some of our friends in Philadelphia this summer. And so while we've been daydreaming, I've been looking on Booking.com to check out places where we might stay in Philly. I put in our dates, and there are over 100 options listed. So I'm gonna start narrowing things down. I'm gonna choose places that have an eight or higher rating and a king bed available. And then I'm gonna focus on hotels in one of my favorite neighborhoods, the Rittenhouse Square neighborhood. And look, there's a hotel here with a 9.0 rating, and there's a note on the site that says, "Couples in particular like this hotel. They rated it a 9.5 for a two-person trip." All right, so look at that. That sounds pretty awesome. You can find exactly what you're booking for. Booking.com, booking.yeah. Book today on the site or in the app. Summer: It's when we share more time, more memories, and more photos. And at AT&T, the iPhone 17 Pro is your summer essential. Its center stage front camera auto adjusts the frame to fit everyone into group selfies. You don't even have to turn your phone. And AT&T makes sharing those pics with everyone easy. Right now at AT&T, ask how you can get the iPhone 17 Pro on them with eligible iPhone trade-in, any condition. Requires trade-in of iPhone 15 Plus or higher, excluding iPhone 16E and 17E. Requires eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply. Subject to change. Visit att.com/iphone or visit an AT&T store for details. [upbeat jingle] [gentle music] Silvana Estrada is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Veracruz, Mexico. She won the Latin Grammy for Best New Artist in 2022, and she's been nominated for three others, including for her song "Como un Pájaro," which is the song that we talked about for this episode. It's from her second album, which came out in 2025, but she started writing the song several years before that. So we talked about all the different versions of the song and a couple versions of Silvana herself that emerged throughout the process.

[singing] Te canto como un pájaro en la bruma. Y todo lo que fuimos lo lamento. [singing] I'm Silvana Estrada Beverido.

Thank you so much for sending me all the voice memos and demos that you made for this song.

I have a lot, no? [laughs]

I would love to start with the first one, um, which says it's from October 21st, 2019.

I remember that day perfectly. In the morning, I was rehearsing for a Dia de los Muertos show, and at the middle of the rehearsal, I was so sad I started to cry in a song because I was dealing with a really, really long, difficult relationship, and I was just very, very sad and, like, heartbroken. And then this friend, after the rehearsal, told me, like, "I'm gonna leave you my piano so you can play the piano and do whatever you need to feel better." And I remember that night just, like, playing the piano and, like, vibing, and I remember the quietness of the city. [singing] Se apagaron ya las luces. Ahora duerme la