Music Review // Ynana Rose "Los Ejes de Mi Carreta"

 

Whenever music can teach you something, and that teaching in a sense can be about both music and the culture and history of a people, then I feel like it is an even more important song.  "Los Ejes De Mi Carreta" is a song originally written by Atahualpa Yupanqui, something I didn't know prior to looking up the title and trying to translate it.  What I like about this being a famous cover so that I didn't know was a cover song is that Ynana Rose has also covered "Landslide", which is originally by Fleetwood Mac, and that I would recognize.

This makes me think about the people who might hear this song and recognize it as a cover but might not recognize "Landslide" as a cover or think of it as a Smashing Pumpkins song.  It's a good reminder that not everyone knows everything but that if we know a little bit and how to do some research we can learn.  I feel like in this way music can become more powerful than any other medium as if we keep singing the songs the stories never truly die and just get passed on from generation to generation.

"Los Ejes De Mi Carreta" has a very powerful acoustic guitar part.  It's those strums and plucks which make it feel dark.  I'm imagining either this great salsa dance or perhaps a gunslinger getting ready to take his shot in the Old West.  As serious and thought-provoking as the mood of the song might seem, the lyrics are actually about (as per Wikipedia) people complaining about the axles of the car making noise as the narrator travels around town.  The response to this is that the narrator likes the creaking because it breaks up the otherwise silence of his day.

While this may seem simple and innocent enough on the surface, a lot can be read into these lyrics as ultimately the narrator doesn't fix the creak in his cart's axles and instead it just becomes a part of him.  There is an underlying message here that if you enjoy something not to let others around you tell you that you shouldn't enjoy it.  But also there is that notion of not changing for others when you don't want to- not trying to fit in, but rather to just be yourself.  This really is the type of song which should be studied both musically and lyrically.