'And One Believes': How a Made-Up Bird Inspired a Historic Musical Collaboration

When referring to And One Believes , the book in which he tells how he composed a song with Joan Manuel Serrat , the Mexican novelist Jordi Soler boasts of having taken a trip back to his childhood, the time when he first discovered poetry.

"I've gone back to being the child who listened to Serrat's songs . In the book, I take a trip to the Catalan community where I was born in Veracruz, Mexico. For me , it all began with his album dedicated to the poems of Miguel Hernández ; from songs, I moved on to becoming a poet and then to the desire to write," Soler said in an interview.

The volume published by Random House is a chronicle, essay, and memoir of Soler's childhood in the 1960s.

The story of the four-handed song began two days before Valentine's Day in 2021, the second year of the plague. Serrat called Jordi to discuss the passage from the novel The Prince I Was , in which the Mexican mentioned several colorful birds, including the xirimicuaticolorodícuaro .

The singer-songwriter asked what kind of bird it was, and the novelist confessed to having invented it . Serrat then proposed writing a song together about the winged creature.

Soler's first challenge in creating his new book was to write in the first person without giving prominence to the "I." That is, to avoid appearing boastful because he enjoys Serrat's friendship , whom the Barcelona-based Mexican considers the alpha singer-songwriter of the Spanish language.

"I had to avoid the pedantry that comes with recounting my relationship with Joan Manuel Serrat. To address that , I had to maintain the perspective of a child who admires the artist . The narrator looks up to his favorite singer; that facilitates the narrative self, inserted there because there was no other way to narrate," he explains.

In And One Believes the reader learns that Serrat is a master of composing, hates having his songs played when he's eating in a restaurant, and is a lover of cooking , determined to improve his culinary repertoire and interested in the way his friend prepares quesadillas, a popular dish in Mexico.

"I didn't intend to create a book, but I have a habit of taking notes on everything in a notebook, and when I was writing the verses, I would write down what Serrat and I discussed on the other page of the notebook. A few months later, I had a log with the work on one side and its references on the other," he reveals.

As in several of his novels, in this recently published non-fiction work, Jordi Soler returns to the theme of exile by revisiting the memories of his parents in Veracruz , where they settled after fleeing Franco's Spain, which also forced Serrat to live in Mexico for a few months.

"I was born into a family of exiles who longed to return and knew that after a certain number of years away, there was no country to return to because everything had changed," he explains.

With the sensitivity he possesses when dealing with the issue of emigration, he laments the reality, with deportations like that of the President of the United States, Donald Trump , and the lack of opportunities for those who emigrate, a custom of human beings since the beginning of time.

" We live in a crazy world , but I prefer to think that after this fever of selfishness, we will arrive at something more social democratic, with empathy for others," he says.

The Mexican is grateful, he who contracted the "virus" of poetry through Serrat and for half a century boasts of being an incurable convalescent.

" I love Pessoa and a lot of other poets . I keep going back to André Breton, and for a time I was a Nerudian (Pablo Neruda). Anyway, I have many loves in poetry; these days I'm reading the Mexican Julia Santibáñez; I'm delighted with her most recent book," he confesses.

Jordi Soler will return to Barcelona in a few days and there he will work with Serrat on the xirimicuaticolorodícuaro song, which has been a bit long so far.

–Are you able to fluently say the name of your invented bird?

–I find it impossible; Serrat does it; obviously he's going to sing it.