Songs 2020 #3: "Esta En Ti," Adriana Rios

 

Rios starts with a deep breath, like she's uncertain before a big statement, maybe she's bracing herself for saying anything at all in the middle of the pandemic. Guitar arpeggios lay a path for her careful first steps. 

It doesn't take long for her to pick up the pace and emphasis, singing of people stripped of the familiar, losing their past identities and finding unity in a common cause. The guitar bangs out flourishes that expand the music's limits. Her voice pushes harder with each verse.

As she sings of doctors and nurses fighting a war that others fight from home, the sound grows epic in its reach. She finds a way to hope and a new kind of freedom, against a rising sun. 

Sure, it may be romantic. She may even sound naive. 

But she's not wrong. 

This is the world the pandemic could show us, is showing us in our best moments, and, as this record's playing, you hear the echo of your own flickers of hope in quiet moments, those moments when the reason for hope seems plain as day. Not just the possibility but the practicality of the vision is unmistakable. 

Of the moment and more demo than finished record, Adriana Rios's "Esta En Ti" ("It's In You") still matters now and matters deeply. After all, Rios isn't talking about anything intangible. She's talking about a real fight to contain a real virus and what it all means. 

Some of us have had the sense of possibility she expresses, at least at the beginning of the pandemic. We thought surely we would come together before a million died, before 11 million in the U.S. alone (versus 1 million in Mexico) contracted this unpredictable and deadly illness.

The fact that no one came through with PPE until too late, the fact that whole cities lay under siege while many speculated about hoaxes, the fact that the public good failed to take precedence over the hungry maw of the stock market, the fact that billionaires grew richer than ever while eight million Americans faced evictions, all of these things may well have cost us our sense of possibility.

But if you listen to this voice, you can't turn away, and if you can't turn away, you can't miss her call. And if we could find ourselves talking about what it would take to answer her--past our old identities and ideas about how things work, we might live in a better world, overnight. Listen to Rios sing and tell me you can't hear that new world aching and fighting hard to be born.

Esta En Ti

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zU5US8h7u5E