Pongamos Que Hablo de Madrid

The harmony serves the text — a deliberate choice in the cantautor tradition. Staying within natural E minor throughout keeps the focus on Sabina's narrative without harmonic distraction. Minimal chromaticism, open-position guitar chords, and a repeating cycle that feels simultaneously familiar and gently unresolved: these are the hallmarks of early-80s Spanish guitar songwriting, and this song is a textbook example.

Sabina co-wrote the song with Antonio Sánchez for his second studio album. By then he had been living in Madrid for years after leaving Úbeda (Jaén), and the song reads as a dispatch from someone who loves a city precisely because he was not born into it. The title's conditional framing — 'pongamos que hablo de Madrid', let's say I'm talking about Madrid — creates deliberate literary distance, suggesting the cityscape stands in for something larger without spelling out what.

Co-written with Antonio Sánchez and produced by José Luis de Carlos for the album 'Malas Compañías', the song casts Madrid's neighborhoods as characters in themselves. Sabina — an Andalusian transplant from Úbeda — channeled the city's grit and romance into a cantautor anthem that became one of the defining documents of early-80s urban Spain. The conditional title phrase, 'let's say I'm talking about Madrid', gives the lyrics a literary distance that has kept the song in heavy rotation for over four decades.