"A dolphin helped me compose the summer song"

Ramon Mirabet had been playing on the street for years when life took him to Glenfinnan, in the Scottish Highlands. “I slept in a train carriage in the middle of the woods, alone, and there was a very small TV in the driver’s compartment – he explains–. One day I turned it on and the Estrella Damm summer advert came on. I heard it and thought: one day it will be my music that plays in the advert.” Years later, when he had already made a name for himself on stage, he received the commission: “Do you want to record the song for this summer’s advert?” I still remember my answer: “I’d been waiting for that message for a long time!”

Summer, he assures, has always been a very important time of year for him, which is why it was also so special to be able to compose the song, which he titled Those little things, and which has a curious story behind it. “I didn’t compose it alone, I had the help of a dolphin”, he explains. A dolphin? It turns out that to create the song he only had two weeks: he spent them in Formentera with only his pianist, Òscar, for company. On the ferry back to Ibiza, still with many doubts in various parts of the song, Mirabet started playing the melody when, suddenly, a dolphin appeared. “I started playing the parts where I had doubts and told myself that I would choose the part that made the dolphin jump. That’s how I finished the song, with its help”, the singer recalls.

He has many special summer nights, but he especially remembers one, the night he was invited to play at the lighthouse at Cap de Creus, which from then on became a second home. Being invited, he says, was quite random: “A musician had let them down because he had malaria and they called me. I turned up there without knowing it was an African music festival, so I started by singing gospel songs and spiritual music that my mother had taught me as a child. We did the concert at sunset, then the stars came out, and we stayed until half past five in the morning with the African musicians singing and dancing in that incredible place that makes you feel like you’re on the moon”.

And so Cap de Creus became part of the singer’s emotional landscape, which also includes Sant Feliu de Llobregat, where he lived as a child, and Sitges, which “thanks to being one of the most advanced towns in Europe, especially in LGTBI rights”, “opened his mind” and made him approach music with a rich, joyful, and optimistic spirit.