Fotos y Recuerdos — Selena (1994)

Why this song

Here is a test you can run in one minute. Play twenty seconds of the 1982 video below, then twenty seconds of the 1994 one.

They are the same song.

The voice sings exactly the same notes in both. Everything that changed is underneath: the rhythm, the instruments and the language. This page is about that — how much of a song you can swap before it stops being that song.

Historical context

In 1982 the English band the Pretenders almost stopped existing. They fired their bass player over a drug problem, and two days later their guitarist, James Honeyman-Scott, died. He was twenty-five.

Two people were left: singer and songwriter Chrissie Hynde, and the drummer. On 20 July 1982 they walked into a London studio with hired musicians filling the gaps and recorded "Back on the Chain Gang". Hynde wrote it for the guitarist who had died. It sounds cheerful. It is not.

Chrissie Hynde, autora de «Back on the Chain Gang», en Santa Bárbara (California) en 2007. Foto: John Slonaker, CC BY-SA 3.0, vía Wikimedia Commons

Twelve years later, in Corpus Christi, Texas, A.B. Quintanilla — Selena's brother and producer — heard that song on the radio on a flight home from New York. He was short of material for his sister's album and thought it could work as a cumbia in Spanish. The band's keyboard player, Ricky Vela, wrote the new words.

Then the album nearly died. Amor Prohibido was already pressed, due out on 13 March 1994, when distribution was stopped: they had no permission. Hynde's publishers warned her, and she refused to clear it until somebody translated the Spanish lyrics back into English so she could read what her song was now saying. Only then did she agree.

The single came out in January 1995. Selena died on 31 March that year. The following week "Fotos y Recuerdos" reached number one on Billboard's Hot Latin Songs chart and stayed there for seven weeks.

Musical characteristics

Start with what does not change, because it is most of what makes a song recognisable.

The tune is identical, note for note. Underneath it, four chords loop from start to finish. In the version you will play, in D major, they are D, A, Em and G. A set of chords that always repeats in the same order is a chord progression, and this is one of the most used there is: in numbers, I–V–ii–IV.

What changes is the accompaniment — everything playing under the voice. In the original, the English band plays electric guitars holding long chords while the drums hit a dry, regular beat. A rock band playing like a rock band.

In Selena's version those same four chords come out as short keyboard stabs, with a violin over the top carried by the synthesiser. And the rhythm underneath is no longer rock: it is a cumbia, a dance that started in Colombia and became the party music of Mexico and Texas.

Güiro cubano de calabaza, de unos 35 cm. Foto: Miguel Andrade, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons

What tells you it is a cumbia within two seconds is a scraper like the one in the photo: a ridged instrument played with a stick, always off the beat, between the drum hits. That steady scratching is the signature.

The size of the story changes too. The English lyric is about a death; the Spanish one is about someone kissing a photograph before falling asleep. Same subject — missing somebody — with the edge taken off.

Hard facts: E flat major on the record (D major in your version), 4/4, 180 BPM on the chart, 2:36. Careful with the tempo: 180 looks fast because the chart counts every half beat; tap the pulse with your foot and you get 90. Same speed, counted two ways.

The form has ten stretches: intro, three rounds of verse and chorus, an interlude — an instrumental stretch with no singing — one more chorus, and a coda.

Trivia and curiosities

• Chrissie Hynde did not ask for money first. She asked for a translation. She wanted to read what her song would say in another language before letting it say it.

• The whole album sat in a warehouse because of this one track. A cover version is neither free nor automatic: the tune has an owner, and the owner can say no.

• In the 1982 original, the metallic clanging in the chorus was made by hitting the 11 kg weights the studio used to hold microphone stands down. It was a nod to Sam Cooke's "Chain Gang", from 1960. Songs were borrowing from each other long before samplers existed.

• George Harrison of the Beatles said in 1992 that "Back on the Chain Gang" used a chord he had invented for one of his own songs in 1966. So the song Selena covered had already taken something from somebody else. There is nearly always someone before.

• It is the shortest track on Amor Prohibido: 2 minutes 36 seconds. It does not need more, because the same four-chord round comes past about thirty times.

Classroom activities

• Play: the four-chord loop in D major — D, A, Em, G — without stopping. Ukuleles and electric guitar take the chords, the bass plays only the note each chord is named after, the drums hold the rhythm. It is the same loop all the way through, so once one round works, the whole song works.

• Compare: the same loop, twice. First as rock, drums hitting dry and steady, guitars holding long chords. Then as cumbia, short stabs and the scraper off the beat. Nothing different is played: it is played differently.

• Analyse: two columns in your notebook, "same" and "different". Listen to both versions right through and sort the tune, the words, the chords, the drums, the instruments and the speed into those columns. Then answer in writing: how many things would you have to change before it stops being the same song?

• Create: take a song you can already play and change only the accompaniment — different rhythm, different instruments — without touching a single note of the melody. That is exactly what A.B. Quintanilla did.

Key vocabulary

• Cover version — versión (volver a grabar una canción que ya existía, con tu propio arreglo)
• Chord progression — progresión de acordes
• Accompaniment — acompañamiento (todo lo que suena debajo de la voz)
• Cumbia — cumbia (ritmo de baile colombiano, adoptado en México y Texas)
• Interlude — interludio (tramo instrumental, sin voz)

Resources

Where it is explained — this song feeds the unit ¿Cuándo empieza una melodía a decir de dónde eres?, from the Year 3 theory and history book. If it caught your interest, Year 4 has a whole page on the same question: ¿De quién es la melodía que estás cantando?.

Official audio — Selena (1994)

The original — The Pretenders, "Back on the Chain Gang" (1982)

Guitar — Requintos Tab. The intro riff with the tab scrolling on screen. It lasts 46 seconds: it is the intro, not the whole song.

Ukulele — Marian Danely. A full tutorial, chord by chord, six and a half minutes.

Bass — Víctor Hugo. Not a lesson: the bass line played right through with the tab underneath. Made for copying by eye.

Drums — Alfonso Gurrola. Not a lesson either, a cover: you can see the whole kit and what each hand does through the song.

• Tab — Songsterr link in the file header
• Cover image — Selena y Los Dinos en 1986. Foto: Ramon Hernandez, dominio público, vía Wikimedia Commons