Introduction

Howard Gladstone explores the importance of place in his songwriting in this three-part blog series, writing about India (Part 1), Spain (Part 2), and New Orleans (Part 3). These are emotional maps, not travelogues songs that grow from the character and contradictions of each locale.

Rather than document his travels, Howard reflects on how each place shaped the feeling or meaning of a song. Through this series, he explores how geography inspires creativity and how travel, even brief, leaves something behind in the music.

Part 2: Echoes of Spain

Spain has always stirred the imagination and for me, it also stirred songs. Three in particular came out of time spent in or thinking about the south of the country: Cordoba / Rider’s Song, Granada Nights, and Birds of Spain.

These aren’t journal entries or travel songs in the usual sense they’re impressions, drawn from deep cultural shadows, echoes of history, and present-day reflections.

Some places sing even before you write a note. Andalusia was one of them. The light, the architecture, the language and the unspoken grief in the shadows. I arrived as a traveler, but I left with songs shaped by Spain’s history, beautiful places, poets, and unfinished stories.

Cordoba / Rider’s Song

This song is more homage than invention. I didn’t write the words Federico García Lorca did. His poem Canción del Jinete (“Rider’s Song”) describes a lone horseman heading toward Córdoba, fully aware he’ll never arrive but with no other choice but to continue It’s a fatalist vision, stripped of sentiment, driven by cadence:

Jet black mare, full round moon

Olives in my saddlebag

Though I know the road so wellI shall not get to Cordoba

My role was to create the musical environment sparse and haunting that could do justice to Lorca’s powerful imagery. The poem needed space and stillness a sonic landscape for inevitability, foreshadowing death and finding the courage to face it with courage and resolution.  Lorca’s poetry doesn’t comfort. It confronts.  It also inspired me and helped set the tone and template for the following songs.

Granada Nights

Granada wears its past on its walls. The Moorish influence, the Andalusian guitars, and the echo of Lorca who was murdered at the start of the Spanish Civil War linger in the air. Granada Nights is a song of lost love and a lament with allusions to the “changing of the guard” which might reference the triumph of fascism.

Lorca lingers in the background a poet silenced by fascism, yet somehow more present than ever. The song is one of lost love, personal life disrupted by war, with an air of loss and inevitability. 

Losing love tastes so bitter

I never want to see you go

Oh Andalucía!

Hear the music change

From the poems of Lorca

To the saddest song I know

The song chronicles loss but makes the bold statement

Love look over these prison walls

Where beauty can’t be scarred.

History has proven that right.  The fascists have long been gone.  They tried to silence to poets. But Lorca remains and beauty, art, and perhaps even love remains.  That is a major part of what I carried away from my excursions to Andalucía.

Birds of Spain

This song began as a musical and lyrical reflection on the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain a cultural rupture that still resonates.  But as the lyric developed, it became something more timeless and unsettling. Birds of Spain is about exile but also about freedom, and the continuing exile of people in our modern today from their homes and lands.

I sat in the tiny town square of Candelario and watched and listened to flocks of birds, including storks, circling over the spires. I was inspired to write the lines of this song.

Birds of Spain are free to roam

We exiled and fallen, we have no home..

The contrast between the natural freedom of birds and the forced journeys of migrants gives the song its tension.

All the Spanish songs I wrote are in the Andalucian mode in minor key settings, reflecting the dark, sombre, often tragic and violent history of this most beautiful place. 

These songs aren’t just about Spanish locations they’re about the emotional landscapes those places opened up. That’s what a true “sense of place” does in songwriting. It sets the tone. It becomes part of the voice.

Overtones

Spain’s history poetic, bloody, and for now, resolved has drawn in songwriters across genres.

The Clash’s Spanish Bombs captures this tension in a different register. Written in the late ’70s, it references the Spanish Civil War and the murder of poets like Lorca. It’s defiant, angry, romantic, and political all at once reminding us that memory and resistance don’t just belong to the past. They keep echoing in rhythm and verse.

Leonard Cohen, one of my songwriting idols, too, was deeply influenced by Lorca even naming his daughter after him. His Take This Waltz is a homage to Lorca’s imagery, translated through Cohen’s voice and rhythm. That lineage of song poet to songwriter, Spain to Canada makes sense to me.

Conclusion

Spain doesn’t offer easy resolution. It offers beauty and brutality, often in the same line. It gave me stories to tell and songs to shape.

Enjoy the complete lyrics to these songs and many more in Timepieces: Selected Lyrics by Howard Gladstone.  For the full experience, listen to the songs on the favorite streaming service or from Howard Gladstone’s Music Store. https://howardgladstone.bandcamp.com