Llorarás

Oscar D'León arrives as one of Venezuelan salsa's supreme gifts — a voice so warm and naturally musical it seems almost generous, as if the man cannot help but give pleasure to everyone in his vicinity. This song is structured as a gentle prophecy of heartbreak: the narrator tells a lover who has wronged him that she will cry, that the same abandonment she delivered will return to find her. But D'León delivers this not as threat or revenge fantasy but with a kind of tender certainty, almost sympathetic, as if he already feels sorry for what's coming. The arrangement swings with a buoyancy that is distinctly his — lighter than the Fania sound, warmer in its brass voicings, with a piano tumbling through its lines like a stone skipping across water. His vocal improvisations in the coro sections are improvisational in the truest sense — spontaneous, conversational, the voice chasing ideas through the harmony with the ease of someone who thinks in music. There is genuine joy in this song even as it carries a melancholy message, because D'León is constitutionally incapable of making joyless music. You reach for this when you've been through something difficult and have arrived at the other side, when the wound has closed and you can afford to look back with something approaching equanimity, or even a certain ironic warmth.