Sweet Ardor and Misery: Ani Cordero and "Macorina"

How many of us look back on our young days with some longing? Everything felt so much more alive then, because we were so young and our bodies were overflowing with chemicals and hormones! The loves and losses that I had when I was a young man were the loves and losses that I felt strongest - everything had such a black and white quality to it. Every love was the greatest, and every loss was the keenest.

Those memories were sweet, and something that we can look fondly back upon and remember those strong emotions, but I'm not sure that I would want to go back to them. You can only have your heart broken once to have those callouses and protective barriers grow around you. Once your innocence of love and loss is compromised, there isn't any going back to those sweet days when you felt so much and were willing to give so much to keep those feelings of love going and going as long as possible, and the feelings of melancholy and sadness also. Because I will admit it - I reveled just as much in the sadness and melancholy of loss as I did in the first buds of a crush, or the first attentions of a new love. Now, at my ripe age of 50, it's hard to feel that kind of excitement and those rapid swings of emotion again, and frankly I think I'm better off for it. But sometimes, I look back and remember the passions of youth and wonder what it might be like to feel them in all their sweet ardor and misery once again.

Today's song is a reinterpretation of a classic Latin love song song by a rising star in the Latin music world. Macorina by Ani Cordero, was originally sung by Costa Rican singer Chavela Vargas, and its lyrics bring me back to those heady days as a young man and promises of love that each of us directly or indirectly experienced. Ani Cordero is a Puerto Rican-born musician who started her music career in Tucson, Arizona fronting a band bearing her own last name, Cordero. In 2000, accompanied by her husband, musician Chris Verene, she moved to New York and reformed the band and toured nationally with Calexico and Los Lobos, among others. By 2005, she had become quite well known in the New York rock scene, and she joined a new Latino pop and folklorico group called Pistolera. Macorina is from her first solo album Recordar: Latin American Songs of Love and Protest, in which she sings eleven songs of political and social significance in Latin America. It was released in April of 2014.