How many times have I sung that song?
If I had 100 euros for every time I’ve sung My Way, I would be a millionaire. And that is not a joke.
I sang it on the last day of each of my Caminos de Santiago, and sometimes during the journey too. I sang it at karaoke nights, whenever people asked me to, because perhaps there is nothing more cliché than My Way at karaoke. I sang it alone, under my breath, the way you sing certain songs that, at some point, stop being just songs and become a kind of mirror.
And even when I was not the one singing it, but only listening, each version gives me something.
Sinatra, obviously. Blue Eyes at their best.
Paul Anka, with all the weight of the songwriter behind the words.
Tony Hadley, the crooner reminding us that he does not need the band to shine, though with the band he shines even more.
And then my favorites: Tom Jones, Elvis, and Robbie Williams at the Royal Albert Hall. Believe it or not, I ended up creating a playlist on Youtube just for great versions of that song.
And I still remember when a dear friend, after hearing me sing it, said to me, “I love it. And you know something? Nobody sings it like you.”
That was almost twenty years ago. I had lived much less life then. And yet those words were not just balm for my ego. They were proof of something I was already searching for, and perhaps had always been searching for, in art and in life: style.
A voice. A signature. A footprint.
I do not even care whether she was exaggerating. What matters to me is something else: that after three guitar notes, three vowels, or three lines on a blog, someone might say, “That’s Marco!”. And now, in my forties, I finally feel that I am beginning to sing, play, and write as myself.
I am writing this from Cambridge, Massachusetts. The ten-year reunion of my master’s program has just ended, and I am leaving with something more than the reunion itself. Something happened at the margins, almost off to the side, and it stayed with me. I do not know yet whether I will write about it. But I do know that I felt intensity, gratitude, and purpose, all at once, in their purest form.
And then, this morning, just as I was about to drink my coffee, eat my eggs, and catch up on emails at Hark, My Way came through the speakers.
The right song, in the right place, at the right time.
When I reached Finisterre on my tenth Camino, I found myself quietly humming Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. A couple of minutes later, I came across a Gypsy musician playing it on the violin. A beautiful coincidence, which someone could define serendipity. I felt in harmony with destiny.
But today, perhaps, was even better.
Because destiny did not give me what I wanted.
It gave me what I did not know I needed and what, in truth, I desperately needed.
