gran canaria fan sings with rosalia madrid concert

Gran Canaria Fan’s Dream: Singing with Rosalía Twice

A Dream Fulfilled, Twice Over

“Tonight, I’m going to be the one singing with Rosalía.” That’s what Canary Islander Pachi Benítez (@pchbenitez) said before it happened. He told his family and friends, and even shared it in an Instagram story. It first happened in the summer of 2023 at the Granca Live Fest, and it occurred again on Monday 30 March: the Catalan singer pointed to him at Madrid’s Movistar Arena during the concert that opened her ‘Lux’ tour in Spain, and sang ‘Dios es un stalker’ with him. “Here and everywhere/ my silence strikes/ owner of the world and of ideas/ everybody wants me on their side,” he is heard screaming in the self-recorded video that immortalised the moment. For this Rosalía superfan, what happened was no surprise.

Strategic Planning and a Gran Canaria Precursor

It had already happened to him at the Motomami show in Gran Canaria. Knowing the artist came down from the stage to sing ‘La noche de anoche’, he chose a strategic position—waiting from one in the afternoon until midnight without eating, drinking, or going to the toilet—to be right at the front when the moment arrived. That July night, when the Catalan singer appeared at the Estadio de Gran Canaria to the cry of “Saoko, papi, saoko,” Rosalía looked at him and chose him. Almost three years later, she did it again in Madrid. “I was absolutely certain,” recounts Pachi, who also attended the concert alone. “If I go and she sees me, she’ll want to sing with me,” he says he thought before the trip.

The Perfect Spot and an Inevitable Connection

With the certainty that she would see him and his VIP ticket—which he secured only a month before the concert after failing to get one when they first went on sale—the Canary Islander arrived at the Movistar Arena at 3:40 pm, lucky to find the venue practically empty. This allowed him to choose the perfect position, right next to the barrier he knew the artist would pass. “I don’t know if she saw me giving it my all or saw me singing… We looked at each other and it was exactly the same as last time. That’s why, when I shared the video, I said she was as sure about it as I was,” he explains. From the outside, the scene could be read as a stroke of luck, but in his telling, Pachi speaks of “energy” and “connection”: “I’m a bit mystical, and she’s a Libra, like my best friend. And I connect a huge amount with that type of person. She could perfectly well be part of my group of friends,” he points out.

A Deepening Fandom and Personal Significance

The Canary Islander started listening to Rosalía when her album ‘El mal querer’ was released in 2018. He was struck by the sheer originality of the Catalan artist’s proposal, which mixes “flamenco, nails, tracksuits,” in Pachi’s words. “I saw her as super different,” he recalls, though it was during the pandemic, with the song ‘Dolerme’, that the connection deepened. “Because of the personal moment I was in at that time, that song started to really affect me. I listened to it every day and began to create a super weird bond with a person I didn’t even know,” he adds. With ‘Motomami’, his admiration for her intensified even more, to the point of tattooing an ‘M’ after the album’s release. “Her way of expressing herself, her way of being… I see her as so different. She doesn’t follow rules, she doesn’t follow norms. So I connect a huge amount with her,” he stresses.

Regarding ‘Lux’, Pachi explains how, in recent months, the songs from the artist’s latest album have acquired a special meaning for him. “My mother passed away in January and it has helped me connect a lot with the moment. It has helped me a great deal with the songs she has released, with the lyrics. It has helped me cope with it, the subject of death, the subject of seeing everything from a different point of view and making a lot of allusions to the spiritual. The powerful thing is that, when my mother was alive, she listened to the album with me; she loved it too, she always listened to it with me.”

An Eternal Moment and an Unpredictable Future

From here, what remains is the echo of an instant that lasts as long as a song, but which stretches in memory as if it would never end, like that halo of eternity emanating from the ‘Lux’ album, and even from Rosalía herself. When asked what he believes the singer’s next project will be, Pachi is clear: “You never know what she’ll do next. Suddenly I can see her dancing samba at the Rio Carnival, with the Cariocas. You never know, and that’s what has me so hooked on her,” he concludes.

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