Las canciones que me diste

"Las Canciones que Me Diste" (The Songs You Gave Me) is about inheritance, the music, the words, and the way of feeling the world that my mother passed to me without ever calling it a gift. So much of why I write at all traces back to her.

It goes back to childhood, to the songs she sang while her voice helped me fall asleep. Without knowing it, she was planting seeds in me, seeds of stories and of love that would grow into everything tender in my music. The songs I make now are, in a real sense, the ones she gave me first.

For me, memory is a form of love. Life takes us all down different paths, but these shared songs keep her voice present, right here with me. I have come to believe that someone who sings for a child never truly leaves, because they go on living through the stories and the songs that are sung again.

So this is my promise: whenever I face silence or need comfort, I will sing the songs she gave me, and in singing them I will keep our connection alive. It is gratitude shaped like melody, handed back to the person who taught me to hear it.

Miguel Vallarta