Learn Spanish Travel Spanish Blog

After the post “Improve Your Spanish Comprehension – With Music!”, I received a request for music suggestions. Glad to oblige. (And thanks for visiting our site, Joyce).   There’s a ton of music out there. Where I live, we are fortunate to have both a Spanish language radio and television station. Both are good, and even the things I can’t stand on some English speaking channels — “Sunday, Sunday, Sunday. BE THERE!” — I don’t mind as much in Spanish, since I’m focusing on learning the words. And the music on our radio station is pretty varied. Well, it is all about broken hearts, but sylistically speaking it’s varied. (Here’s an exercise for you. Listen to a song and count the number of times the word corazón is sung).

Okay… 1st song.   In the navigation bar above, click on HOME, which takes you to the home page of this website.  In the left sidebar, you’ll see a YouTube box.  Click it.  The song is wonderful.  Wonderfully funny.

But seriously folks….. My favorite Spanish music is Cuban.  I have no idea why.  I just really really like it.  I’m not knowledgeable enough about music to tell you what it is that sets Cuban music apart from the music of other countries.  Maybe someone will enlighten us.  But, even though I truly like all the many varieties of Spanish music, Cuban is my favorite.  And along those lines, I recommend an album called the Buena Vista Social Club.  If you don’t like this album…. well, you need to eat  more salsa.  If you’re looking for a nice slow song to help your Spanish, you can’t do better than Dos Gardenias from that album.  The whole album is great.  And one of the singers, Ibrahim Ferrer, made several wonderful albums of his own.

Linda Ronstadt has several albums in Spanish.  Canciones De Mi Padre (Songs of My Father) and Jardin Azul are interesting albums.  Click on the title to hear clips from all of the songs on the albums. My favorite Ronstadt song is Lo Siento Mi Vida, a haunting, lovely wisp of a song.  There is a YouTube version of it, but the sound isn’t the best.  You can hear it on the Album Jardin Azul and the lyrics are on lyrics.time.  There are several versions on YouTube by various artists, and they’re all worth listening to.  I could listen to that song over and over.   I HAVE listened to that song over and over.

More?  How about Omara Portuondo?  A classic.  Here she is with Ibrahim Ferrer singing another of my favorite songs: Quizas Quizas Quizas .

So… Do YOU know any good slow Spanish songs to help with our studies?  Send us your favorites via comments below.

Tags:   Cuban Music · Learn Spanish · Spanish musicNo Comments