The songs on Más Allá del Sol (Past the Solar) paint an image of a life examined by means of deeply felt moments. For Mexican singer and songwriter Joan Sebastian, who was usually referred to as el poeta del pueblo (the individuals’s poet), these included one unhappy eighth of April when certainly one of his horses died, described within the track, titled in Sebastian’s sometimes simple type, “Cuando Murío Mi Caballo” (“When My Horse Died”). As informed within the lyrics, it was his birthday, a date that from then on would conjure recollections of “that fantastic animal” who danced like no different, celebrated within the track to the punchy brass and snare beat of a banda ensemble.
Sebastian, who died in 2015 at age 64, was and would stay one of many greatest regional Mexican stars. He was an interpreter of Mexican kinds – norteño music, rancheras, and corridos, and, inside that musical framework, a masterful author and performer of pop songs. The twelve tracks on Más Allá del Sol exhibit his fluid versatility in compositions united by their partaking storytelling and expression of Sebastian’s lust for residing.
Hearken to Joan Sebastian’s Más Allá del Sol now.
The title monitor was a Billboard Latin Songs chart hit for 35 weeks after its launch and has endured as a Latin music anthem. Sebastian is backed by a lush, swaying orchestral association, made for dancing shut. Listening to “Más Allá del Sol,” it’s simple to think about the singer shifting throughout the stage radiating charisma, or, as he usually did, using round a rodeo area, a Tony Bennett on horseback. One other monitor titled merely “Sol” bounces with pleasure and a few glitz, sending a flirty message. Right here, the widespread musical theme of unrequited love looks like a sunny day quite than a darkish evening.
When Sebastian does deal with drowning his sorrows in drink, on “La Medicina,” it’s in an equally lighthearted means, framed by tubas and yipping. As he notes within the track, he’s a person who can examine himself to “a hen with a lot of eggs in the nest,” suggesting that perhaps there was not an excessive amount of to cry about within the romance division.
Sebastian was married a number of occasions, and his many love tales had been carefully chronicled by the Spanish-language press all through his profession. One relationship that was continuously speculated about as “an impossible love” i.e. platonic, was with the actress Salma Hayek. One in every of Sebastian’s nice and most attractive love songs, “Eso Y Más,” has been usually acknowledged to be have been devoted to Hayek, an assertion that was confirmed by Sebastian’s son Julián Figueroa (additionally a performer, who died in 2023). The spare acoustic guitar ballad, which is the final track on Más Allá del Sol, “Eso y Más” begins with Sebastian stating that “esto que por ti siento” (“what I feel for you”) was extra lovely than the love of Romeo and Juliet.
It was Sebastian’s inspirational optimism, collectively along with his trendy tackle conventional music, in addition to his movie-star seems, that made him so engaging to audiences, in Mexico and in the USA. Born Jose Manuel Figueroa in Juliantla, a small city in Mexico’s Guerrero province on the Pacific Coast, he migrated to Chicago as a younger man to hunt his fortune, and shortly started to tour within the American Southwest, on the best way to changing into an icon.
The indomitable spirit that got here by means of in his songs stayed robust regardless of his difficulties. Two of Sebastian’s eight kids had been shot and killed. And he endured an extended battle with most cancers, by no means ceasing to carry out by means of years of therapy. He recorded greater than 35 albums in his lifetime and received 4 Grammys and 7 Latin Grammys. He died on his ranch in his residence state of Guerrero.
“My songs are a response to feelings, to what I’ve lived,” he as soon as stated in an interview with Billboard. “The important thing is that the songs be sincere, that they be truthful.” He expressed these sentiments in “Viviré lo Mío,” (which may very well be translated as “I’ll Live My Truth”), a monitor on Más Allá del Sol:
…Yo, viviré lo mío
Lloraré lo que haya que llorar
Sí, sufriré lo mío
Pero ahora hay que celebrar
Vida, vida hay que celebrar
La vida
I’ll stay my very own reality
I’ll cry for what needs to be cried for
Sure, I’ll undergo what I’ve to undergo
However now we should rejoice
Life, life we should rejoice life
Hearken to Joan Sebastian’s Más Allá del Sol now.
