Fly free, like the “Andorinhas” 🕊️ Ana Moura’s new single out now ♫
Swallows (andorinhas in Portuguese) don’t die, spring never ends and rebirth is a constant. This is a lesson in life. This is a certainty of Ana Moura. The artist reached a special moment in her journey. The word “career” can be reductive here, as it suggests that deviations or changes in direction or intention do not fit with this idea. But Ana Moura, the artist who conquered the tops and the world, who performed in the most important venues on the planet, from the Sydney Opera House to Carnegie Hall in New York and then to the Olympia in Paris and the Barbican in London, and who had stars of a global dimension in the front row to applaud her, like Prince and Mick Jagger, knows well that art does not sacrifice itself. “Andorinhas” is therefore a symbol: of freedom and emancipation, of creativity in its pure state, a refusal of the bonds of success, a declaration of a will for the future. And anything goes.
The artist Ana Moura was never just one thing: she left her mark on fado, prolonged Amália’s genius, touched the soul of a people and unleashed the heritage of Africa that she carries with her when, for example, she crossed her voice with that of Bonga in the classic “Valentim,” with which the woman from “Com Que Voz” once toasted us. Ana Moura’s fado was always different: it had color where black used to prevail. It asked for festive balance where an almost funeral solemnity had commanded before. It admitted other types of ideas and words, translating a different identity, mestizo, creole, that always it existed at its core. It was this particular quality that led her to be invited to pay tribute to the Rolling Stones on record, and to share the stage with the pop genius Prince: these pioneering artists recognized in Ana’s voice, posture and aura a universal quality, impossible to contain across borders or genders.
“Andorinhas” is, therefore, a new soul that is thus freed. Because “swallows are queens / flying the lines of freedom”, she sings, who wants to “go away”, to “just come back one day”. Because, very clearly, the world is her home. In the video, shot on the rooftops of a popular neighborhood in Olhão, Ana shares space with those who dance and feel, showing herself with a new image and posture, with a visual language that is both authentic and universal, both modern and timeless.
On a cadence of tropical shape and with a balance of Africa that is both ancestral and of the future, the artist proposes a new idea to define us all, positioning us in a place that is not geographic but emotional, which is not historical but is nevertheless cultural because it does not refuse anything that time has brought us, ending in a port of Lisbon that has received so much through the ages.
Our future already has a soundtrack. Fly free, like the “Andorinhas”. And Ana Moura knows where they are going. Where are we all going. And so, we have to follow these “Andorinhas”.
Ana Moura’s new single, “Andorinhas”, is a hymn to freedom with a creole balance aimed at the future.
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