“Clandestino” is the title song of Manu Chao's first solo album (1998). The singer is a migrant living without papers in a big European city: he walks alone with his sorrow, his life is forbidden, and the authorities call him clandestine. Toward the end the song lists people from different places — all clandestine, all in the same situation.
Manu Chao, born in Paris to Spanish parents, made the album after years travelling in Latin America, and it became a soundtrack for a generation, especially in Spain and Latin America.
The music is quiet and hypnotic, the lines are short, and the vocabulary is plain: to go, to run, alone, lost, papers, the law. It's simple Spanish carrying a big subject, which makes it a powerful song to learn early.