The Author of Lamento Boliviano Speaks: Argentina’s First Billion-Stream Rock Hit

Up on a platform, in the middle of a vineyard in Mendoza, Natalio Faingold looks at the horizon, facing the sun, hums the first chords of Bolivian Lament. The hit he composed 42 years ago It is the first Argentine rock song to reach one billion views on Spotify.

Considered a Latin American rock anthem, the song transcended borders with the version by the Green Dwarves (recorded in 1994, on the album big Bang), but the original is from the band from Mendoza Ethyl Alcohol (written in 1984 and released in 1986) with members who experienced common scenarios and life stories with the Enanitos, who were also from Mendoza.

The record of Bolivian Lamentoccurred just two weeks before the death of the guitarist and founder of Enanitos Verdes, Felipe Staiti, a friend of Faingold, with whom he created other of the band’s best-known songs, Cordillera.

But what is the story behind Bolivian Lament? “I remember the moment very much. I was in my room, in the house where I lived with my parents and siblings (in the city of Mendoza), and I grabbed a Fender guitar, because suddenly the music and the chorus came to my head: “And I’m here, drunk and crazy…”, recalls Natalio.

The composer, who was 24 years old at the time, was neither drunk nor crazyassures that the melody and the lyrics, went down like an antenna signal in his mind.

In his five decades of career, Natalio Faingold nor you will never forget the moment when you received a message on WhatsApp that said “Welcome to the billion club”. “I was very happy, the songs are like children who take their own flight, they don’t depend on us,” he says.

Bolivian Lamento has more than 70 versionsthe best known is that of the Enanitos Verdes, but there is also that of Turf, a cumbia and versions in Spain and Türkiye. “In the case of the Enanitos, it was something mutual: they took this song to another level and Lamento… also made them transcend“, reflects Faingold.

Settled on a leather sofa in his friend Mike Tango Bravo’s villa, Faingold confesses something unexpected: “I don’t like the Alcohol version (the colloquial way in which he talks about his group Alcohol Etólico), beyond the fact that I composed it, I was not the one who recorded it. On the other hand, Los Enanitos Verdes recorded it in a studio in Los Angeles, with a very careful style and sound.”

Remember that it was a very inspiring time, in which Modern Clicks, by Charly García, was played a lot. “I thought of Lamento Boliviano as a bolero, something playful, but with deep feeling.. I think I recorded that song on a cassette so I wouldn’t forget. I went to take a shower, came back and completed it,” Faingold will say, hugging his acoustic guitar.

Then he took that song to the Ethyl Alcohol rehearsal room. They started playing at midnight, in the house of Chacras de Coria of the parents of Dimi Basshis co-author. It was there the first time they played it and recorded it on a cassette. It was tried out on local stages, in bars, in clubs, and it quickly caught on in Mendoza.

A few weeks later, Natalio and his brother began a trip to Machu Pichu with a group of friends. “It was very special, where tourism was not developed and you moved among the local people, on the trains we traveled in second gear, we got into everything,” he remembers.

The name of the song appeared on the banks of the Urubamba River, when Faingold was getting on the train to Aguas Calientes. (Cusco, Peru). “There was someone singing a very sad song, it was a coya and I asked him what was wrong. He told us that he had lost the harvest, he had lost everything,” he says.

The farmer’s lament was added to the lyrics. But the song was finished by Dimi Bass, the bassist of Alcohol Etilico. And Faingold explains: “When I come back from Peru, Dimi tells me, ‘Look, I found the song you left here on a cassette. I added some things to it,’ I loved it and there it was put together.” It was recorded in 1986 with the title Soy como una roca.

Dimi said that The lyrics are influenced by the books of Gabriel García Márquez or The Open Veins of Latin America by Eduardo Galeano. Faingold, reinforces, “is the part that says: Baby, don’t lie in bed… I don’t know how I did it, how I had the brain to write something like that and how it came out so easily.”

Los Enanitos Verdes did not ask for authorization to record the songbecause being a cover, that permission was not needed. But there was a complicity of friends and colleagues of many years, in what was the rock scene of the late ’70s and ’80s in Mendoza, so no one was surprised that Marciano Cantero and his band recorded it.

Faingold started his career in bands from Mendoza, first Altablanca (a reference for 70’s rock) and then Alcohol Etólico, who shared some musicians with the Enanitos Verdes such as, Sergio Embrioni and Horacio Gomez.

“We knew Marciano Cantero from the neighborhood rock scene, and Felipe Staiti from school, because I was a classmate of his sister at the secondary Central University College in Mendoza, which has been an art plant, where Dimi Bass also studied,” he recalls.

The recent death of Felipe Staiti is a difficult pain to bear. “We were in constant contact. Felipe played in many of my bands, and we have recorded a lot of things together, although he always belonged to the Enanitos Verdes,” says Faingold. And reveals that It has many unreleased songs recorded with the Enanos guitarist… and that he would like them to come out this year.

Faingold studied piano from the age of five, encouraged by his mother. “I was born in a house of musicians. My mother played the piano and we listened to music all the time. Also my father was a good friend of Armando Tejada Gomez and Mercedes Sosa. We lived in a very cultural environment, where music was very important,” he describes.

He went to Music School and left rock bands to study musical composition in the United States. He lived for 20 years in London, where his four children were born, and in recent years he set up his studio in Uruguay, near La Juanita, with his girlfriend Giada Valsecchi. His last creations were a fusion of rock and folklore about The Futre (the headless ghost) and another with the story, of Deolinda, the Late Correa.

Regarding the threat of AI to musical composition, the Mendoza musician maintains: “Between the ’70s and ’90s, the world was divided between disco and rock, conceptual music and entertainment, but I think there are two valid concepts: music is good or bad, it doesn’t matter if it is rock, reggaeton or tango,” says Faingold.

He clarifies that he does not like original creations coexisting with thousands of songs created with AI. “It’s like a silly toy that hurts. Something is always missing from AI composition. I think it is increasingly important for the listener to know that there is a human composer behind it, someone real. That’s why it’s becoming more and more valuable to go to a show and listen to the musician you like live. “I don’t use AI to compose, because something is always missing, it’s a copy, it’s like a bad painter,” he points out.

And he says about some of his favorite artists: “I don’t agree with Herbert Hancockan American jazz pianist, keyboardist and composer I admire, who believes that no one wants music and DJs are more important. “Music is much more important than a computer, and art will always be important,” he says.

“Music has to express, move and reach; it never has to be virtuosity, but rather it has to come from the heart. I am not one of those musicians who believes that I am fantastic at something,” he emphasizes.

Bolivian Lament It reached 1,000 million views on Spotify, being the first Argentine pop rock song to belong to the Billions Club along with songs in Spanish such as Slowlyby Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, or unforgettable dance by Bad Bunny. Only one local artist had achieved the feat: Bizarrap in 2023 with “Quevedo: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 52”, but it is electronic music and not Argentine rock.

“Lament… It has something visceral -analyzes the creator-. “The phrase drunk and crazy, with an idiotic heart, believes that it is a message connected to the collective unconscious.”

He knew it was a universal song walking through his hometown. “I heard the Mendoza police band doing an instrumental version of Lamento Boliviano, and I realized that it had crossed generations“, account.

There are many songs that could have had that fate, but no one knows why this one worked. “Bolivian Lament It does not have a corporation behind it, it was not the theme of a movie nor was it sung by a famous person, The song made its way on its own, all is not lost“.

An anecdote summarizes the universal value that a song that began in a neighborhood setting and surpassed borders can achieve. In 2022, during the wake of Marciano Cantero (leading voice of the Enanitos Verdes, who died from a kidney problem), the Bolivian consul in Mendoza gave a flag to the musician’s son, in the name of his country, and in gratitude. “Bolivian Lament made us famous in the world, helped spread the culture and allowed my compatriots to feel proud of their origin,” said the Bolivian representative.