Silvana Estrada - Como Un Pájaro

Silvana Estrada is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Veracruz, Mexico. She won the Latin Grammy for Best New Artist in 2022, and she’s been nominated for three others, including for her song “Como Un Pájaro,” which is the song that we talked about for this episode. It’s from her second album, which came out in 2025, but she started writing the song several years before that. So we talked about all the different versions of this song, and a couple of versions of Silvana herself, that emerged throughout the process. For more info, visit songexploder.net/silvana-estrada. https://songexploder.net/silvana-estrada

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and, piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway.

• 0:11Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I'm going to be on tour, playing some shows this fall. I'm going to be in London on Wednesday, November 18th. I'm going to be performing solo at Rough Trade Records on Denmark Street, and I'm going to be in conversation about my music moderated by one of my favorite actors and writers, Matthew Bainton. And a ticket to the show also gets you a copy of my album on vinyl or CD. And in December, I'm going to be on tour supporting S. Carrie. We're going to be playing a bunch of shows in the Northeast US. So I hope to see you in one of those places. You can find all the details and get links to tickets at songexploder.net/live. That's songexploder.net/live.

• 0:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 1:56Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 2:38Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 2:59Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Silvana Estrada is a singer, songwriter, and producer from Veracruz, Mexico. She won the Latin Grammy for Best New Artist in 2022, and she's been nominated for three others, including for her song "Como un pájaro", which is the song that we talked about for this episode. It's from her second album, which came out in 2025. But she started writing the song several years before that. So we talked about all the different versions of the song and a couple of versions of Silvana herself that emerged throughout the process.

• 3:56Speaker 01

  I'm Silvana Estrada Beverido.

• 4:00Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Thank you so much for sending me all the voice memos and demos that you made for this song.

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I have a lot, no?

• 4:06Hrishikesh Hirway?

  I would love to start with the first one, which says it's from October 21st, 2019.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I remember that day perfectly. In the morning, I was rehearsing for a Día de los Muertos show. And at the middle of the rehearsal, I was so sad, I started to cry in a song. Because I was dealing with a really, really long, difficult relationship. And I was just very, very sad and like, heartbroken. And then this friend, after the rehearsal, told me like, "I'm gonna leave you my piano, so you can play the piano and do whatever you need to feel better." And I remember that night, just like, playing the piano and like, vibing. And I remember the quietness of the city.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  [Singing] Se apagaron ya las luces. Ahora duerme la ciudad. Se entregaron las piernas por cariño. Y por piedad mientras yo prendo velitas en fresquitos de cristal. Que esconchó las enlaces y al final puedo cantar. Mientras todo el mundo duerme.

• 5:41Speaker 01

  Yo me trato de sanar.

• 5:50Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Could you translate the lyrics that you're singing?

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Now all the lights are off and the city is asleep. People is hogging, if it's not for love, it's for misericordia, pity. While everybody is sleeping, I'm just trying to feel better. And then it says, while everybody is sleeping, I'm just trying to not love you anymore.

• 6:32Hrishikesh Hirway?

  As you were writing it, how were you feeling about what you'd come up with?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, I really like this idea. I really like this sense of saudade, you know, like this impossible kind of nostalgia of the present.

• 6:48Hrishikesh Hirway?

  At the end of this voice memo, there's a little thing that happens that feels like a real document of what your headspace was in that moment.

• 7:01Speaker 01

  Pobrecita.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  It was one of those relationship, you never know if you're in or out. I don't know what to say. Have you ever tried that? It's really bad for your health. But I guess I was starting to understand, like, whoa, I'm gonna be very miserable in this relationship, but I don't wanna live.

• 7:26Hrishikesh Hirway?

  One thing that was interesting to me is that you said "anyway" in English.

• 7:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. I feel like as a Mexican, we don't have that attitude. Like, we never don't care, we always care. So yeah, that attitude, it's more accurate to say it in English.

• 7:45Hrishikesh Hirway?

  There's also a lyric in this first version that only exists in this version. There's a line where you say, "Déjeme seguir cantando."

• 8:01Speaker 01

  I'm saying, "Please let me sing even if it's about to sunrise." But I changed it because when I started to do the chorus, I was gonna talk about singing. So I need to hold the idea of singing because I was gonna say, "Te canto como un pájaro en la bruma." I'm singing you as a bird in the middle of the fog. And I really want this image of a singing bird to be like, boom, the strongest moment that it's gonna kind of glue all the verses. And now the song's more dramatic. It's like, "Please leave me alone, even if I'm crying, because what else can I do if I love you and you don't love me?"

• 8:47Speaker 01

  So basically, I was like, "Drama, drama, drama, drama, drama." And then, "Singing bird."

• 8:55Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And where did that idea of the singing bird even come from?

• 8:59Speaker 01

  You know, a few months before the pandemic, I was like, "Oh, my God, I have my first apartment. I'm gonna do so many parties and like, I'm gonna have the time of my life." And then, two months after, it was like COVID and the lockdown. And I was kind of starting to finally ending this super toxic relationship. And the pandemic was like this really difficult mirror that confronted me. It was like, you know, "What am I doing with my life?" moment. My insomnia went so bad that I was like waking up at 6:00 PM,

• 9:41Speaker 01

  spending the whole night trying to learn how to play guitar, and falling asleep at like 8:00 AM in the morning. So my highest peak, it was like at 5:00 in the morning. And I was in this eighth floor. All my windows were looking directly to the trees. Even some branches of the trees were like... Entering my apartment. So I started to feel like a bird. Because you know, they don't sing for anybody. So that was definitely like stuck in my mind like, oh my God, I'm part of this group of birds who are completely lonely.

• 10:25Speaker 01

  And we're just singing our sorrows, not for anybody, but for ourselves.

• 10:48Hrishikesh Hirway?

  This feels so different from the first version. Just the music feels so much less melancholy.

• 10:54Speaker 01

  I was trying to sound happy, which sounds a little bit pointless since the words are so sad. I guess I was just trying to find some light in the courts.

• 11:20Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So this was in 2020, but the song didn't come out until several years later. So what happened in the meantime?

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Then a bunch of things happened, you know, that year I toured like, I don't know how many countries. I won my first Grammy. And really bad things happened also. My best friend, he and his brother, they were murdered that same year. And I was so sad, like the amount of sadness I'm carrying is not even possible. But at some point, I was also feeling a bunch of pressure to do something else. Like, let's do another album because like, okay, I know you're sad, but like, you need to do something, right? You need to do another album.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  You have the songs. So I guess part of my healing process was, you know, producing this album and producing "Como un pajarro", and just trying to find the right sound because I was so lost and afraid that it took me a while to come back to me.

• 12:33Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So the next demo that I have is from September 2022. What was happening then?

• 12:38Speaker 01

  I was in Spain. I was with my band doing this residency.

• 12:58Speaker 01

  I have a really cool band, so I was like, I'm gonna use your skills to try some ideas out. I think that was the moment where I said, like, should I work with a producer? No, this is something I need to do myself because it's so personal and it's me that it's lost. So it's me that needs to find the way back.

• 13:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 14:08Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 14:15Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 15:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

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• 16:11Speaker 01

  You know, all my composer friends are always like, "Silvana, you need to do breaches. You only do verses and choruses, you never do breaches." But, you know, I come from jazz and folkloric music, and there are no breaches. So, sometimes breaches to me sounds like this moment where you're actually not saying anything specifically, you're just doing the breach. And I was like, "No, I don't want to do that. I'm just gonna whistle."

• 16:50Speaker 01

  It's not singing, but sounds different.

• 17:09Speaker 01

  Since it was a demo, I wasn't thinking much about doing like a professional whistling or whatever. And then at the studio, I tried so many ways of doing it, like, I even called a friend of mine, which is like a professional at it. And he whistled the melody, and it was so perfect. And we were like, "Nope, we still prefer this whistling."

• 17:35Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So when you went to make the final version of the song, the version that's on the album, where did you end up doing that?

• 17:40Speaker 01

  In Casa Studio El Desierto, which is Daniel Vitran's studio, the engineer of the album and a really, really dear friend of mine. I went to the studio and I remember I took the guitar and I was like, "Danny, I don't know if this is gonna be the day because I'm feeling tired." And he was like, "Okay, but let's try it first." Like, I already set the mics, just take the guitar and sing the song, and let's see what happens.

• 18:31Speaker 02

  Que me cure la penumbra, todo bien y todo mal. Mientras todo el mundo duerme, yo me trato de sanar.

• 18:51Speaker 01

  We were like, oh, it happened. Let's not try it again. Let's keep it like that. And it was really a magical moment for us. It was like, great, let's keep going.

• 19:09Speaker 01

  Roberto Verastegui, my piano player, I was showing him the song, and he started to play those chords, like very simple, just to learn the harmony. And I was like, just do that for the beginning. And he was like, for real? Like, it's boring. And I was like, no, no, no, no, keep it, keep it. It's really nice to establish, like, this is the harmony. After that, you can open.

• 19:37Speaker 01

  We put together the drums and the piano at the same time.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  The drum is like a transcription of the sound of like a Brazilian surdo. It gave the song like something really playful, like musically playful. There's a really deep rhythmical conversation between the drums and the piano.

• 20:23Hrishikesh Hirway?

  What made you decide that you wanted to have upright bass on this song instead of electric bass?

• 20:28Speaker 01

  This is funny because actually, the first mix, my dad told me like, oh, it's crazy that you're using a synth instead of an upright bass. Because my dad, he's a double bass player, like an upright bass player. And I was like, "That, that's an upright bass." And he was like, "Oh, it doesn't sound like it." And we actually had to do something, like mixing. It was too clean. Anyways, I really, I just, I love it. Grooving in a really folk way.

• 21:29Hrishikesh Hirway?

  It was interesting to me that as you're building this arrangement, you still only have one lead vocal. There's like no harmonies, there are no backing vocals, no double, anything like that.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  I always keep my vocals as simple as I can. I don't know why. I guess that's my singer-songwriter vein. Like, I never want anything kind of competing with the words, you know, the kind of the universe of the song. It's always in order to support the message. And for a song like this, I think it's so important to protect and take care of that truth and that transparency, because it's not something you can fake.

• 22:19Speaker 01

  Te canto como un pájaro en la bruma y todo lo que fuimos los lamento.

• 22:46Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Could you translate those last words in the chorus? After you say, "I sing to you like a bird in the fog."

• 22:52Speaker 01

  And everything that we have been, I regret it. You know what? This song comes from a really angry place. Like, the words are really harsh. That's where I started this song, for sure. But then, when I came back to this song, I was like, I want this to be more about solitude and contemplation than just a heartbroken song. To me, it was very cinematic, just the idea of loneliness. And like, the problem with being alone is then you need to see all your demons. You need to face all of them.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  And this reminded me so much to like the Hayao Miyazaki movies. Like, My Neighbor Totoro. Like, "El viaje de Chihira", I don't know, spirited that way, I think it's in English. And then I was like, oh, I need that kind of orchestral sweetness on this. Because I need sweetness to face all my ghosts and my demons and my pain. And life in general, it's pretty much sadness and pain. But I think the thing that keeps us alive, it's sweetness. And this song, it's full of like this vulnerable moments.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  So for me, it was like, no, this needs an orchestra.

• 25:07Hrishikesh Hirway?

  So we're talking now and it's 2026. The song came out in 2025. You know, from that first moment in 2019. I'm wondering, like, what is your relationship to the song now? Both in terms of the evolution that it had and just, I guess, what it's about?

• 25:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's crazy because the other night, this song made me cry, actually. But now it's a different feeling. You know, something really interesting happens with songs. It's like, some songs are there for you and you're not ready for them. I feel it, but I don't know yet where this is gonna lead. But I need to kind of be patient. I see myself in this eighth floor in the middle of the pandemic, just hanging with birds and nobody else and singing for nobody.

• 26:04Speaker 01

  And I see this song as a testimony of this young girl just trying to figure out her life and figure out what to do with solitude and sadness and pain and finding beauty in that.

• 26:39Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And now here's "Como un pájaro" by Silvana Estrada in its entirety.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Se apagaron ya las luces. Ahora duerme la ciudad. Se entrelazan las piernas por cariño y por piedad. Mientras yo prendo elitas en frasquitos de cristal. Que me cure la penumbra, todo bien y todo mal. Mientras todo el mundo duerme, yo me trato de sanar.

• 27:27Speaker 02

  Voy limpiando los caminos que me llevan junto a ti. ¿Cómo pudo ser posible las señales que no vi? Déjame si estoy llorando aunque vaya a amanecer. Que por más que yo te quiera dime tú qué puedo hacer. Mientras todo el mundo duerme yo te dejo de querer.

• 28:09Speaker 02

  Y yo que no soy más que un mar de dudas que sola con mis sombras me tropiezo. Te canto como un pájaro en la bruma y todo lo que fuimos lo lamento.

• 29:26Speaker 02

  Y yo que no soy más que un mar de dudas que sola con mis sombras me tropiezo.

• 29:41Speaker 02

  Te canto como un pájaro en la bruma y todo lo que fuimos lo lamento.

• 30:12Hrishikesh Hirway?

  Visit songexploder.net to learn more. You'll find links to buy or stream the song. This episode was produced by me, Craig Ely, Mary Dolan, and Kathleen Smith, with production assistance from Tiger Biscuit. The episode artwork is by Carlos Lerma, and I made the show's theme music and logo. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more about our shows at radiotopia.fm. If you'd like to hear more from me, I write a newsletter, and I talk sometimes about the making of these episodes. I also write about music and film and the creative process. You can find a link to the newsletter on the Song Exploder website.

• 30:54Hrishikesh Hirway?

  And you can also get a Song Exploder shirt at songexploder.net/shirt. I'm Rishi Kesh Hirway. Thanks for listening.

• 31:07Speaker 02

  Radiotopia. From PRX.