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I'm Rishi Kesh, here we go.
“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 "Gomotun Paharo", 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 of versions of Silvana herself that emerge throughout the process. I'm Silvana Estrada, Veracruz. Thank you so much for sending me all the voice memos and demos that you made for this song. I would love to start with the first one, which says it's from October 21st, 2019.
“I remember that they perfectly. In the morning I was rehearsing for the Adelos Muertos show,”
and at the moment 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 hard broken. And then this friend, after the rehearsal told me like, "I'm going to 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.
I was so sad I started to cry in a song because I was just very sad and like vibing in a song because I was just very sad and like vibing in a song because I was just very happy
“on the guitar. Could you translate the lyrics that you're singing?”
Now all the lights are off and the city is as lip. People is hogging if it's not for love. It's for misedicordia, pity. While everybody is slipping, I'm just trying to feel better. And then it says, "Well, everybody is slipping. I'm just trying to not love you anymore." As you were writing it, how are you feeling about what you'd come up with? Yeah, I really like this idea. I really like this sense of saladaging and like this
impossible kind of nostalgia of the present. At the end of this voice memo, there's a little thing that happens that feels like a real document of what your headspace was in that moment.
It was one of those relationships, you never know if you're in or out. I don't know if you have
you ever try that. It's really bad for your help. But I guess I was starting to understand like, "Well, I'm gonna be very miserable in this relationship, but I don't want to live." One thing that was interesting to me is that you said anyway in English. Yeah, I feel like as a Mexican, we don't have that attitude. Like, we never don't care.
We always care. So yeah, that attitude, it's more accurate to say it in English.
There's also a lyric in this first version that only exists in this version.
There's a line where you say, "There is a Mexican, can't understand.
I'm saying, "Please let me sing even if it's about to sunrise." But I changed it because when I
“started to do the chorus, I was gonna talk about singing. So I need to hold the idea of singing,”
because I was gonna say, "I'm singing as a bird in the middle of the fog." And I really want this image of a singing bird to be like, boom, the strongest moment that it's gonna kind of blue all the verses. And now the song's more dramatic. It's like, "Please leave me alone even if I'm crying." Because what else can I do if I love you and you don't love
me. So basically, I was like, drama, drama, drama, drama, and then singing birds.
“And where did that idea of the singing bird even come from?”
You know, a few months before the pandemic, I was like, "Oh my God, I have my first apartment. I'm gonna do so many parties." And like, I'm gonna have the time of my life. And then two months after it was like COVID and the lockdown. And I was kind of starting to
finally ending this super toxic relationship. And the pandemic was like this really
difficult mirror that confronted me. It was like, you know, "What am I doing?" My life moment. Mine subnyat went so bad that I was like waking up at 6 p.m. spending the whole night trying to learn how to play guitar and falling asleep at like 8 a.m. in the morning. So my highest peak was like at 5 in the morning. And I was in this 8th floor. All my windows were looking directly to the trees. Even some branches of the trees were like entering my apartment. So I started to feel
like a bird because you know, they don't sing for anybody. So that was definitely like stock in my mind. Like, "Oh my God, I'm part of this group of birds who are completely lonely and we're just singing
or sorrows, not for anybody but for ourselves." This feels so different from the first version,
just the music feels so much less melancholy. I was trying to sound happy which sounds a little bit pointless since the words are so sad. I guess I was just trying to find some light in the courts. So this was in 2020, but the song didn't come out until several years later. So what happened in the meantime? Then a bunch of things happened. You know that year, I toured like, I don't know how many countries I won my first Grammy and really bad things happened. Also,
my best friend, he and his brother, they were murdered. That same year, and I was so sad. Like, that amount of sadness I'm carrying is not even possible. But at some point, I was also feeling a bunch of pressure to do something else. Like, let's do another album because like,
“okay, I know you're sad, but like you need to do something, right? You need to do another album.”
You have the songs. So I guess part of my healing process was, you know, producing this album and producing "Gomong Bá Khadó" and just trying to find the right sound because I was so lost and afraid that it took me a while to come back to me. So the next demo that I have is from September 2022. What was happening then? I was in Spain. I was with my band doing this residency.
I have a really cool band.
that was the moment where I said, like, should I work with a producer? No, this is something I need to do myself because it's so personal and it's me that it's lost. So it's me that needs to find the way back. My conversation with Sylvanah Estrada continues after this.
“You know, all my composer friends are always like Sylvanah. You need to do breaches. You only do”
verses and chorus. You never do breaches. But, you know, I come from jazz and folkloric music
and there are no breaches. So sometimes breaches to me sounds like this moment where you're actually not saying anything, it's specifically you're just doing the breach. And I was like, no, I don't want to do that. And I'm just going to whistle. It's not singing, but sounds different. Since it was a demo, I wasn't thinking much about doing like a professional whistling or whatever. And then at the studio, I tried to so many ways of doing it. Like,
I even called a friend of mine, which is like a professional at it. And he whistleed the melody, and it was so perfect. And we were like, nope. We're still pre-fair this whistling. So when you went to make the final version of the song, the version that's on the album, where did you end up doing that? In Casa Estudio de Cierto, which is Daniel Beatran's studio, the engineer of the album and a really, really dear friend of mine, I went to the studio. And
“I remember I took the guitar and I was like, then, I don't know if this is going to be”
today because I'm feeling tired. And he was like, okay, but let's try first. Like, I already
set the mics, just take the guitar and sing this song and let's see what happens. We were like, oh, it happened. Let's try it again. Let's keep it like that. And it was really a magical moment for us. It was like, great. Let's keep going. [Music] Roberto Verastigui, my piano player, I was, you know, showing him the song.
And he started to play those chords. No, like, very simple, just to learn the harmony. And I was like, just do that for the beginning, no? And he was like, for real, like, it's boring, you know? And it was like, no, no, no, keep it, keep it. It's really nice to establish. Like, this is their harmony. After that, you can open. We put together the drums and the piano at the same time.
The drum is like a transcription of the sound of, like, a Brazilian sort of a, it gave the song like something really playful, like, musicly playful. There's the, really deep, rhythmic vocal conversation between the drums and the piano.
“What made you decide that you wanted to have upright bass on this song instead of electric bass?”
This is funny because actually, the first makes my dad told me, like, oh, it's crazy that you're
using a synth instead of an upright bass. Because my dad, he's a double bass player, like an
Upright bass player.
like it. And we actually had to do something, like, mixing. It was too clean. Anyways, I really,
I just, I love it groovy in a really folk way. It's interesting to me that as you're building this arrangement, you still only have one lead vocal. There's like no harmonies. There are no backing vocals. No double anything like that.
I always keep my vocals as simple as I can. I don't know why. I guess that's my singer-songwriter
vein. Like, I never want anything kind of compitien though with the words, you know, the kind of the universe of the song. It's always in order to support the message. And for a song like this,
“I think it's so important to protect and take care of that truth and that transparency.”
Because it's not something you can fake. Could you translate those last words in the chorus after you say I sing to you like a bird in the fog? And everything that we have been, I regret it. You know what, this song comes from a really angry place. Like, the words are really harsh. That's where I started the song for sure. But then when I came back to this song, I was like, I want this to be more about solitude and
contemplation than a just a hard broken song. To me, it was very cinematic, just the idea of loneliness
“and like the problem with being alone is then you need to see all your demons. You need to face”
all of them. And this reminded me so much to like the Kayao Miyasaki movies. Like my neighbor Tatoro like, um, I don't know, I don't know, it's a period of that way. I think it's an English that I was like, oh, I need that kind of orchestral sweetness on this because I need sweetness to face all my ghosts and my demons and my pain and live in general. It's pretty
“much satinism pain. But I think the thing that keeps us alive, it's sweetness and this song,”
it's full of like this vulnerable moments. So for me, it was like, no, this nids an orchestra. [Music]
So we're talking now and it's 2026. The song came out in 2025. You know, from that first moment
in 2019, what is your relationship to the song now? Both in terms of the evolution that it had and just I guess what it's about. Yeah, it's crazy because the other night, this song made me cry actually. But now it's as a friend feeling, you know, something really interesting happens with songs. It's like, some songs are there for you and you're not ready for them.
I feel it, but I don't know it yet where this is gonna lead, but I need to ki...
I see myself in this eighth floor in the middle of the pandemic just hanging with birds.
“And nobody else and singing for nobody and I see this song as a testimony of”
a this young girl just trying to figure out her life and figure out what to do with
solitude and sadness and pain and finding beauty on that.
“And now here's Goma un Pajaro by Sylvanah Estrada in its entirety.”
I'm going to the end of the world, I'm going to the end of the world, I'm going to the end of the world.
I'm going to the end of the world, I'm going to the end of the world.
“I'm going to the end of the world, I'm going to the end of the world, I'm going to the end of the world.”
I'm going to the end of the world. I'm going to the end of the world, I'm going to the end of the world. I'm going to the end of the world, I'm going to the end of the world. Visit songexplotor.net to learn more. You'll find links to buy or stream the song.
This episode was produced by me, Craig Ealy, Mary Dolan and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Bisco. The episode our work is by Carlos Lerma and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX and at work of independent listener supported Artistone Podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, I write a newsletter and I talk sometimes about the making of
These episodes.
the newsletter on the Song Exploder website and you can also get a song Explotor shirt at songexplotor.net/shirt.
I'm Rishi Kesh, her way. Thanks for listening. Radio Topia from PRX.
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