Finding Philly in Madrid: A songwriter’s story of a fresh start

Huddled in a cellar are a handful of people I cannot understand, gathered in front of a stage I just walked onto. A heavy fog glazes over me. I step up to the microphone and become blinded by my nerves before my first song – which isn’t entirely uncommon, but usually by the end of the verse I find my exhale. This time, I play through, waiting for an exhale that does not and will not come for weeks. 

I am in Madrid, at a venue called Libertad8. I’ve been here for 89 days. I’ve come from Philadelphia, where I spent the past five years living and learning and stumbling through the beginning of a career in music. I wanted a change and I wanted to see how my music – and how I – could fit in a place completely foreign to me. I move into a relative’s apartment, find a guitar, and find a way to make myself less of a stranger. I find an open mic to go to every night and nestle myself nervously in corners of bars, feeling aimless and shy and only slightly justified when it’s my turn to sing. I flounder through conversations as best I can and get worse before I get better. 

I spend the majority of my days wandering around the city, usually walking from one end to the other and waiting for the sun to set. I lay in the grass in El Parque Oeste and write. For a week, I teach English to a two-year-old who lives around the corner from Bernabéu Stadium. I become eager for the evenings, which stretch out before me with crowded streets and friendly faces, only ending when the sun comes up and the vermouth runs dry. I find that this is a place that structures itself around the practice of togetherness and I relish it. On my second Saturday, I spend the night walking all over the city, searching for a confidence that I don’t yet have and instead delighting in the observation of this place that is so alive and so hungry. I pass by a busker on Gran Via before turning into my neighborhood. He sings and plays a djembe in the same place nearly every night and becomes a landmark in knowing I’m close to home.  

I make my attendance at the open mics habitual and soon find myself in the thick of the Madrid folk scene. In the backroom of Libertad8 I meet Lia, who sits in a booth beside me and wears a nearly identical outfit to me. I ask her a question and she answers with a dainty sweetness that I discover to be one of her hallmarks.

In the tin can interior of Aleatorio I meet Esmee, who is French and self-assured and decides we should be friends, with which I agree and immediately feel lucky. In the social hub of El Pez Gato I meet Harry, who sometimes goes by Dennis and seems solidified in being an English-Spanish everyman. In meeting him I also meet Brooks, who greets me with an American enthusiasm that, for an instant, feels foreign. When I tell him where I’m coming from, he shouts “Go Birds! Philly till I die!” (I later find out he is from Missouri and has never been to Philadelphia.) Through these new friends, the city reveals itself to me and I am relieved to feel like less of a stranger. 

I book my first show at a place called Open Folk, which is a weekly showcase run by two Argentinians, Augustin and Martin. It happens in the basement of a hostel across the street from Atocha Station on a stage draped with red velvet curtains in a room shaped like a triangle. Brooks and his friends come to the show and collect me afterwards for the rest of the evening, which becomes the rest of my time in Madrid. We spend nights going to jams around the city, making ourselves cozy in apartments sharing songs, and filling seats in rooms full of strangers, beaming with pride and delight to watch each other share music with everyone else. 

I spend a lot of these evenings in the Malasaña neighborhood on a street called Calle del Pez (Fish Street). Every house and establishment on the street has some aquatic emblem and I remark that it’s like Madrid’s Fishtown, which no one seems to understand. I go out to practice my Spanish and scrape my way through conversation, grateful for the patience of those around me. I book my first solo show and go to open mics to promote it. I anxiously recite the show information in Spanish from a notecard at Buho Reál, which is small and owl-themed and becomes a gay club at midnight. It is more my practice to be nearly silent before and after I sing; I’m terrified of saying the wrong thing. I tuck the card away and clear my throat and look up to find people laughing and clapping and someone yells my name. 

My solo show is in the basement of a place called the Tropicana Beach Club, which is a grey box with LED strip lights and fake vines hanging from the ceiling. It is right next to the bathrooms, which are frequented by the guests of the 60th birthday party happening upstairs. The stipulations for the show were that I would have to ensure that at least 20 people came or I’d pay out of my own pocket – essentially a predatory pay-to-play tactic surprisingly common at venues in Madrid. I don’t think I even know 20 people in the city. My friends come and an Italian girl I recognize from the open mics brings what appears to be every other Italian girl in Madrid. I break even. I enjoy the hour and savor it – this is why I came here.

Many songs scored my time in Madrid, but one in particular feels the most special: it’s one by Brooks. A majority of the times I go to his apartment, I ascend the uneven staircase of the building and hear the same chorus from the same collection of voices: Harry, Lia, Brooks, and Julia, who emcees the open mic at El Pez Gato. I usually wait outside the door to let the song finish; it’s proof of something magical that existed before me and I marvel at the serendipity of it all. The song is called “La Estacion” and the group wrote it during the summer, on a day when they missed two trains to a friend’s village to escape the blistering heat that descends on Madrid every year. In November, I learn that Harry is moving back to the South of Spain. As part of his goodbye festivities, the group plans a live-taping of “La Estacion” with a chorus of friends bolstering the final refrain. We pour out onto the street after the party and shoot two takes before the police tell us to move. We go around the corner to a smaller street and start again, amid drunken club-goers and cigarette smokers. By the end of the third take, the shutters of an apartment building fly open and a bucket of water rains down just missing us, followed immediately by shouting from what seems like every other unit in the building.

I play my final shows and open mics and return to the place I started, in the dark backroom of Libertad8. I begin to play, and this time the exhale comes; the weight of aimlessness that I arrived with dispels into something that feels like purpose. I leave my guitar in Madrid, planting a reason to return. I think a lot about where I came from and where I’m going and take stock of the things I’ve learned: the experience of starting from scratch and getting somewhere wonderful, the discipline of taking myself seriously, the value of showing up and being a consistent person, and a renewed sense of urgency to make friends of my peers in my own musical world in Philadelphia. 

There’s a sort of dual-character journey between a girl and her city, between a musician and their city. There are so many ways your city will chew you up and spit you out and piece you back together again. Philadelphia has given me so many of my firsts. In the dingy, swampy basements of Drexel and Temple houses where the air was thick and the spirit was palpable, I felt that it was worth it to try. I felt that I needed to leave Philly to learn that I could always return, and in doing so I am seeing the magic in these streets, the Something in the Water that makes this city sensational. In becoming acquainted with Madrid and trying on an existence in a new city, I feel hungry in a way that is only possible because of how I have been lifted up by Philadelphia.