At Dublin Unitarian Church, on St Stephen’s Green, the first three songs on a spellbinding Wednesday night were about shedding the winter in May, recovering an ancient folk story from a bookshop in an imaginary city, and a landscape artist who died in a glider accident in 1964.
At least those were the explanations offered by the musician on the piano stool. As for what each lyric was specifically saying, I’m a little hazy, because this was a gig by Gwenno, aka Gwenno Saunders, a trilingual musician from Cardiff, and these opening songs were in Cornish.
Beyond her entrancing performance, this has been a landmark week for songs sung in languages that most listeners will not understand without recourse to the internet. Something fascinating is happening in the music industry. A multilingual artist whose work would challenge even the most accomplished polyglot is having a moment.
[ Lux, Rosalía’s new album, is a breathtaking odyssey into music’s further reachesOpens in new window ]
Rosalía – full name Rosalía Vila Tobella – has just broken a record for the “most-streamed album in a single day in Spotify history by a Spanish-speaking female artist”, the streaming platform has announced. But that summary doesn’t quite cover what has happened here. On Lux, her fourth album, Rosalía sings in Spanish and her native Catalan, but also in Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian and Ukrainian.
You don’t have to understand every word of artists such as Rosalía and Gwenno to love them
BBC’s near permacrisis is a cautionary tale for RTÉ about what can happen if editorial oversight starts to drift
Hollywood’s obsession with reissued films makes cinemas feel like museums with popcorn
If Trump’s ‘big beautiful ballroom’ goes to plan it will be capable of staging an Irish wedding
It is, of course, both possible and entirely natural for an artist to become a global phenomenon by amassing fans in Spanish-speaking music markets without troubling the consciousness of too many listeners elsewhere. Before the release of Lux, Rosalía was already a superstar in Spain and had enjoyed some crossover success, helped by clever collaborations, assured hops between musical genres and critical acclaim.
But Lux, despite being saddled with the tag “experimental”, marks a step forward commercially, having reached 41 million streams on the day of its release, compared with the 16 million racked up by her third album, Motomami.
Neither tally, however, is as eye-catching as 14, the number of languages used on the 18-track physical version of Lux – a choice that means even her Spanish-speaking fans will be searching for translations if they want to know what she’s on about.
This, it seems, veers from Rosalía’s personal relationship with God to her feelings about an ex-boyfriend, who I’m sensing from descriptions such as “un terrorista emocional” doesn’t come off quite as well as God.
Rosalía isn’t fluent in all the languages she deploys on the album – she used both professional translators and Google Translate to write Lux. So why do it? Her answer, in an interview with The New York Times, alluded to connection, rebelliousness and a desire to push herself. Why not?
Big record labels, such as Rosalía’s Sony-owned Columbia Records, seem less afraid than they used to be of promoting artists across language markets, and that has to be as culturally healthy as it is potentially lucrative.
For musicians who perform in minority languages, from Gwenno to Kneecap, there’s an obvious political dimension to why they do what they do, but, for fans, the joy of listening to their music will soon take precedence. Songs performed in languages you’re not accustomed to hearing every day possess an inherent freshness. The voice is an instrument, and here it is being used in a different way, with sounds and constructions that aren’t overly familiar.
At this year’s Eurovision, for instance, my favourite entry was the German one, Baller, an electropop track by Abor & Tynna in which several of the lines end with “aber”. It’s simultaneously a prosaic word (“but”) to German speakers and an unusual syllable combination for other listeners to hear so prominently in pop.
There can be an advantage to not quite comprehending lyrics. I’m too old to listen to songs about taking ketamine; I’d prefer not to know how frequently Kneecap rap about drugs.
With Gwenno I like the mystery. Although her Cornish and Welsh albums come with printed English translations, I’ve only ever scanned them. Sometimes there’s nothing more liberating than listening to someone singing in a language that will never be fully knowable.
Tir Ha Mor, the first song she wrote in Cornish, is a mesmeric, timeless bop whether or not you know the title means “Land and Sea”. And her blend of ethereal, psychedelic folk and early electronic influences remains thrillingly ineffable, even though thanks to a crowd-participation section I can now say I’ve spent a night in a church singing a Cornish ode to cheese.
It is one of the deep pleasures of music that it doesn’t need words to convey meaning. You don’t have to understand 14 languages to guess that Rosalía’s Lux explores “the emotional arc of feminine mystique, transformation and transcendence”. It very much has that vibe. Perhaps the music-criticism cliche is true: the best artists, whatever words they choose, will often seem to have a language all of their own.
