Manu Chao's Top 3 Songs

According to Wikipedia, Manu Chao "is a French musician of Spanish descent. He sings in French, Spanish, English, Italian, Arabic, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, Greek and occasionally in other languages." If you know me at all, then you know that he is the kind of artist I would enjoy. But I did not discover his music on my own accord, nor did Spotify or YouTube suggest it to me; in fact, I have three very specific memories associated with his top three songs, which have thus marked him as a notable artist in my own mind.

Please see the screenshot below for his top three songs:

And please see the text below for the memory I associate with each of them.

1. Me Gustas Tu 

When I was studying abroad in Poland in 2015, I lived in a student housing complex called Piast. Piast had a cafe/bar at the ground floor which included karaoke equipment. One night, the other study abroad students and I all gathered to do karaoke. This was one of the songs that played. At that point I didn't speak Spanish fluently yet, so I enjoyed trying to make sense of the lyrics (which were readily available in text owing to the format in which I heard it being karaoke!), as well as hearing the French randomly interspersed throughout. 

2. Bongo Bong

A year after the first memory, I found myself in Europe again, gallivanting around for a month and visiting friends in various countries. My final stop was The Netherlands, where I spent a week in The Hague with my wonderful pen pal Jamie. One of the places we went was a clothes shop called Monki. My sister had requested that I go to that store and get her something, so we went with that in mind. I also ended up getting something from the store – a luggage tag that had a banana on it. While in the store, this song played. I found it to be very catchy, and so did Jamie, so I looked it up later that day when I got home. As for the luggage tag, it had its big break when I departed for my semester abroad in Rwanda. The night before I left Portland, the suitcase I planned on bringing broke, so I had to get one last minute. Here it is with the banana luggage tag, as well as a better pic of the luggage tag from the internet so you can actually see what it looks like.

Which actually brings me to the 3rd song and final memory...

3. Clandestino 

As I might have mentioned on this blog before, my study abroad group in Rwanda was composed of 21 girls and 3 boys. One of them was a boy named James who I found to have worldly, intellectual taste in everything from conversation topics to music. We talked about this song, since I had heard it before but hadn't thought too much about it. He showed me a version sung by a Brazilian artist named Adriana Calcanhotto which he liked, and which I came to like as well. On March 17, 2017, he sent me a text asking if I could learn it on my ukulele. I very enthusiastically replied yes. So during our group trip to Uganda, I sang it to him while our bus was parked on the no man's land between Uganda and Rwanda. Around a month later, we ended up discussing the mutual feelings we had developed for each other over a few beers, and the rest is history ;) 

I don't know why I write this and realize all this only now. I was talking about Manu Chao with James last week and about how I had all these memories associated with those particular songs, and right then I decided that it deserved being written into a blog entry. The fact that each song from 1-2-3 also goes in chronological order with each associated memory only makes me more pleased. 

Who knows what other peculiar patterns are out there for me to find? Well, since there isn't much going on in my life at this moment, I'll be sure to write about them in my blog.