Hijo de la Luna

José María Cano wrote Hijo de la Luna as a dark fairy tale, and Ana Torroja sang it for Mecano on the 1986 album Entre el cielo y el suelo. It tells a tragic Romani legend. A Roma woman wakes at dawn and begs the moon to let her marry the man she loves that very day. The moon agrees, but asks for her first-born child in return. What follows is pure ballad cruelty. The baby arrives with skin of the whitest white and grey eyes, though both parents are dark. The song explains that he is albino because he is the moon's son, but the husband concludes that his wife has been with a payo, a non-Roma man, kills her, and leaves the child on a mountain to die. The moon takes him in, and whenever he cries she wanes into a crescent to rock him like a cradle. Running through the chorus is a question for the moon herself: what would she, who cannot find a husband, do with a human child? The song was a huge success across the Spanish-speaking world, and Mecano also recorded it in Italian as Figlio della luna, with a video styled after Carlos Saura's 1981 film Blood Wedding. Montserrat Caballé and Sarah Brightman later sang it, and in the winter of 1998 to 1999 a Spanish-language cover by Dutch singer Loona spent weeks at number one in Germany. Few pop songs have carried a folk tale so far.