Vuela Con El Viento

Album: Dive Into Water (2017)
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Songfacts®:

  • "Vuela Con El Viento," or "Fly With The Wind," is the lead track from Ayla Schafer's debut album, Dive Into Water. Schafer is a world folk musician who traveled across South America with a horse caravan to witness the healing, music-centric ceremonies of native tribes. She also visited Italy to converse with the country's waters (which inspired "Fluyendo "). But there's no exciting story behind the writing of this popular tune.

    "I'm like, sorry I wasn't like on a mountain top with the wind blowing in my hair or something," she told the Songfacts Podcast in 2022. "No, I was just sitting on my bed about to go to sleep and it really came."
  • The song is about embracing your innermost self and giving thanks to Mother Earth for your existence. "It was really just a very deep time for me, with myself and deep prayers of letting go of that which is not serving me and just coming deeper into myself," Schafer explained.

    "But really acknowledging my vulnerability and my softness, and at the same time, acknowledging myself as part of something bigger, which is why there's this line in there (speaks in Spanish) - which in English doesn't sound as good, but it's like Mother Earth. 'I love giving thanks for my life, Mother Earth. I love you.'

    And just this very simple from the pain, from the learning, from the growing, from the shedding, this essence that we can come to of just like, I'm just here on this earth and I'm grateful. It's very pure."
  • Schafer learned to speak Spanish during her journey in South America, and the language added a new depth of feeling to her music that couldn't be expressed in her native tongue.

    "I was drawn to the language - I like its rhythm, its energy," she said. "You can say things in Spanish that just wouldn't sound right in English. Like if I translate some of my songs from Spanish into English, they're like, oh my God, I wouldn't be able to sing it. They have something, they have a feeling. Each language has its own feeling. That's what I was drawn to."
  • With 20 million listens on YouTube and 10 million streams on Spotify, this is by far Schafer's most popular song.

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