Joan Manuel Serrat, the retired singer who keeps coming back for one song

Joan Manuel Serrat

Photo: Presidencia de la Nación Argentina / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	December 27, 1943 Barcelona
Occupation	Musician
Awards	Barcelona Medal of Honor · Gold Medal of Merit in the Fine Arts · Knight of the Legion of Honour

On a recent night in the gardens of Park Güell, Joan Manuel Serrat walked onto a small stage that nobody had announced him for and sang “Paraules d’amor” with the bassist Horacio Fumero and his daughter Lucía. The night was a tribute to the jazz pianist Tete Montoliu, “one of the people who believed in me most when I was starting out”, Serrat told the crowd, before setting out his terms: he was happy to reappear that night, and afterwards he would disappear again. That is the deal the Catalan songwriter has struck with retirement. He left the stage for good, as he had promised. He just keeps turning up on other people’s.

The habit of singing for others started in a kitchen in Poble-sec, the working-class Barcelona neighbourhood at the foot of Montjuïc where he grew up. His father, Josep, was an anarchist worker in the CNT union; his mother, Ángeles Teresa, was a housewife from Belchite, in Aragon. Accepting an honorary prize this spring, he told the audience there were no musicians in the family: “I am the son of workers and the grandson of peasants. But they were people who sang.” That household, with a Catalan father and an Aragonese mother, would later become the most argued-over fact of his career.

Born on 27 December 1943, Serrat studied agronomy and started a biology degree he dropped in his third year; a grant at a Pyrenean ecology institute, he has said, almost kept him in science. Radio pulled him out. He sang his first songs on Salvador Escamilla’s Radioscope show on Radio Barcelona, which led to a contract with the Catalan label Edigsa and a place as the thirteenth member of Els Setze Jutges, the singers who defended Catalan as a language for modern song under Franco. His first EP, Una guitarra, came out in 1965, and the LP Ara que tinc vint anys followed in 1967, the year of his first concert at the Palau de la Música Catalana.

In 1968 Spanish state television chose him to represent Spain at Eurovision with “La, la, la”, a song written by the Dúo Dinámico. He recorded it, then announced that he would only perform it in Catalan. The regime replaced him with Massiel, who had a few days to learn it and won the contest in London. Serrat was kept off state television until 1974.

Serrat has never contradicted the heroic reading of that episode. It is not the only one. The journalist Àngel Casas wrote in 45 revoluciones en España that the demand was his manager’s manoeuvre to win back Catalanist fans who had been drifting away: ask for the whole song in Catalan, settle for a single verse. The plan failed. The fans did have a grievance. When Serrat began recording in Spanish and acting in films, part of the Nova Cançó audience called him a traitor to the cause, and his fellow singer Francesc Pi de la Serra wrote “Sóc el millor” as an attack on the choice. Serrat’s reply was that Spanish was his mother tongue too. He still writes in both, and says the subject of each song decides the language.

The Spanish records made him a figure across Latin America. He won a song festival in Rio de Janeiro with “Penélope” (co-written with Augusto Algueró) and in 1969 set Antonio Machado’s verses to music on Dedicado a Antonio Machado, poeta, whose “Cantares” became one of his signature songs. Mediterráneo (1971) spent almost a year in Spain’s top ten despite censors who had already altered lines in “Fiesta”; its title track and “Aquellas pequeñas cosas” are the songs most people know him by. He gave a full album to the poet Miguel Hernández in 1972 and kept recording in Catalan, with Per al meu amic the following year.

Then politics closed the border. In September 1975, in Mexico, he condemned at a press conference the executions ordered by Franco’s government. Spain issued a warrant for his arrest and pulled his records from the radio. He spent about a year in Mexico and returned only after the dictator’s death. Pinochet’s Chile kept him out longer. When he finally played Santiago’s Estadio Nacional in 1990, he sang Violeta Parra’s “Volver a los 17” for the seventeen years he had been barred.

Democracy made him a fixture rather than a rebel. He set Mario Benedetti’s poems on El sur también existe (1985) and built his sound with a small circle of arrangers, above all the pianist Ricard Miralles and the guitarist Josep Maria Bardagí. After treatment for bladder cancer in 2004 he went back on the road with Miralles, and in 2006 released Mô, his first all-Catalan album in seventeen years, named for the Menorcan word for Mahón. With Joaquín Sabina he played 71 concerts as Dos pájaros de un tiro in 2007 and later recorded La orquesta del Titanic (2012).

He picked the date of his own exit. Announced in November 2021, the farewell tour El vicio de cantar crossed Latin America and Spain and ended at Barcelona’s Palau Sant Jordi on 23 December 2022 with “Una guitarra”, the song that opened his first record. The honours have kept arriving since: the Princess of Asturias Award for the Arts in 2024, a decade after the Latin Recording Academy named him Person of the Year, and in May 2026 the first honorary prize of the Academia de la Música de España. There he told the room that forgetting catches up with everyone and everything, and that he hoped not to forget them, “at least before you forget me”.

The reappearances since then follow a pattern. In May he joined Jofre Bardagí, the son of his late arranger, on a Barcelona stage and sang “Una mujer desnuda y en lo oscuro” on a guitar that had belonged to the father. In September a duet with Rosa León, “Serenata para la tierra de uno”, from her tribute album to the Argentine writer María Elena Walsh, put him back in a recording studio; earlier this year he had recorded “Te abracé en la noche” with the Uruguayan Fernando Cabrera. At the University of La Laguna, in Tenerife, he meant only to recite “Cantares” for philology students and ended up singing the last verses with the university choir.

He has lived for more than forty years in El Coll, the hillside neighbourhood next to Park Güell, and this autumn he has collected prizes for a life spent with words, among them the Premio Leteo in León and the Glauka reading award in Cuenca, where he told the audience that reading is “truly marvellous”. No album or concert of his own has been announced. The next time Serrat sings in public will probably look like the last few: a single song, on somebody else’s night.