“Una Noche sin Pensar” by Sebastián Yatras, Tuesday, July 23, 2024

July 23, 2024

Sebastián Yatra was born in Columbia and raised in Miami, Florida, before returning to Columbia to begin his musical career. From an early age, Sebastián took an interest in music, learning piano, guitar, and voice. At the age of 12, he saw fellow Colombian singer Juanes in concert. That year, Yatra also starred in the lead role of Troy Bolton in his school’s production of High School Musical. At the age of 20, Yatra dropped out of college and returned to Columbia to pursue music. Today, Yatra is a very popular singer worldwide. All of his solo work is in Spanish. He is a voracious collaborator, teaming up with other musicians in the Latin pop world, singing a Spanish verse with an English—or in the case of Monsta X, in Korean—, or occasionally, an English verse. His discography varies from reggaeton to rock and many other genre experimentations.

IT SEEMS THAT YOU STILL LOVE ME. Many of Sebastián Yatra’s songs are ballads, a tradition in Latin music that has fallen out of favor with many contemporary artists. The song structure of the ballad remains a popular mode in pop, rock, country, and many other genres around the world, and Yatra has voiced a commitment to innovating the sound in Latin pop. He told Vibe magazine in 2018:

I think younger artists are scared. There’s been an error in associating ballads with boring and slow and old. A lot of the time, artists who’ve sang ballads early in their careers have gone urban or gone into reggaeton and that’s awesome, it’s importantisimo, do all these types of music and genres and progress musically.

Today’s song, “Una Noche sin Pensar,” is a kind of uptempo ballad. The rhythm of the song partially distracts from the pensive lyrics in Spanish. Listeners who don’t speak or have a limited understanding of Spanish may think that the song is not a break-up song.

YOU CAN BLOCK ME, YOU CAN HATE ME, OR YOU CAN LOOK FOR MY KISSES IN SOMEONE ELSE. The song “Una Noche sin Pensar” is ultimately a song about fostering one’s own delusions. Many happy-sad songs do this. For example, Miley Cyrus’ “Rose Colored Lenses” paints a scene of a sexy trip to the beach. “Una Noche sin Pensar” doesn’t build up the memories of the past relationship in quite that way. Instead, it’s more like Paramore’s “Rose-colored Boy” in that it talks about the issues as they are real. But the song imagines a scene in which the ex-lovers “forgive each other naked in the sea.” Cyrus pleads for the lovers to “stay like this forever” as they “play pretend wearing rose colored lenses.” In today’s song, there are no rose-colored glasses bathing the world in an artificial hue, but there seems to be alcohol and sorrow. Whether or not the speaker’s love really wants him back or if that is part of the delusion, we may never know. But we all need a few nights of not overthinking everything. So cheers to that!