Songfacts®:

• Brofaction are Laurin Greiter and his younger brother Nico. They're from Austria but many of their songs are in English, including "Barcelona," which finds them spotting a lovely lady on a trip to the city. There's a language barrier, but they get the meaning across: she's beautiful, and they want to get to know her better.
• The Brofaction brothers wrote this song with Alex Forbes, an American songwriter whose credits include "Don't Rush Me" by Taylor Dayne and "I Dance My Dance" by Chic. They met at a songwriting camp, then connected later when the brothers came to New York. There, they wrote three songs together, including "Barcelona."
  
  When she appeared on the Songfacts Podcast, Forbes told the story behind the song: "I had this experience of having a fling with someone who barely spoke any of the same language. He spoke Spanish and I spoke English, but we did seem to get a lot accomplished with very little language in common. I was on vacation in Venezuela, and it was a flirtation, a one-night whatever rolling around on the beach, and that was the end of that. So I had this idea of writing a song that had this hook like, 'How do you say this?' Because that's what you're doing when you don't speak the same language.
  
  So I had that concept, and I have a co-writer outside of Barcelona and I had been in Barcelona. So we started out with this idea of:
  
  Went to Barcelona, phone got stolen
  Ended up alone there sitting in a bar
  Surrounded by water...
  
  The song came out of that, but I knew I wanted to get the 'How do you say?' in there because that had been part of the original concept that had never been realized."
• In the song, they sip piña coladas, which you'd be more likely to order at a resort in Jamaica than at a bar in Barcelona, but according to Alex Forbes, it just sings really well - better than something more appropriate like sangria. Rupert Holmes discovered the same thing when he wrote his hit "Escape (The Piña Colada Song)."
• The music video was directed by Bernhard Somera and features the dancer Mimi Sagmeister.