Rosario

A song for a wounded city

Fito Páez was on tour in Brazil in November 1986 when he learned that his grandmother, great-aunt and Fermina Godoy, who worked in their home, had been murdered in Rosario. The women in his family had raised him. The house in the city where he grew up had become the site of an unbearable loss.

In the weeks that followed he wrote “Ciudad de pobres corazones”. The lyric addresses the city with anger; its narrator does not want to go out into the street. In a later interview Páez described the song as visceral and pointed to the force of its riff. It became the title track of his 1987 album.

The recording preserves that anger in Páez’s voice and in the recurring riff he later singled out when talking about the song.