“La Cigarra (The Cicada)” is a heartbreak song that dares to look death in the eye—asking the singing insect to fall silent, because its beauty feels like a prophecy.
When Linda Ronstadt released Canciones de Mi Padre in late November 1987, she wasn’t simply changing languages—she was returning to an origin story. The album (produced by Peter Asher and Rubén Fuentes) became a cultural landmark, reaching No. 42 on the Billboard 200, going double-platinum in the U.S., and winning a GRAMMY for Best Mexican/Mexican-American Album at the 31st GRAMMY Awards. In the middle of that achievement sits “La Cigarra (The Cicada)”—a song that doesn’t smile for applause. It stares straight into the old, dark water of sorrow and sings anyway.
Ronstadt’s recording appears as track 4 on the album, running about 3:48—long enough to build a spell, short enough to leave you with its chill still on your skin. And while the album itself is often described as a tribute to the music she grew up with, “La Cigarra” feels like a particularly intimate inheritance: not just “a classic,” but the kind of song that families pass along because it contains a hard truth they don’t want to forget.
The song is widely credited to Mexican composer Raymundo Pérez y Soto. But like many standards that travel by voice more than paperwork, “La Cigarra” also carries something older than authorship: a folk imagination in which nature speaks in omens. The cicada—so small, so loud—becomes a symbol of fatal beauty. In one of the song’s most famous opening ideas (paraphrased), the narrator begs the cicada to stop singing, because its song “stabs” the soul—and because its singing feels like an announcement of death. That is the eerie brilliance of the metaphor: the cicada’s music is gorgeous, but it’s also a countdown. It sings as if it has no tomorrow, and that very intensity becomes unbearable to the listener who is already drowning in grief.
What follows in the lyric’s imagery is not the tidy sadness of a pop breakup. It’s the broad, elemental sadness of traditional song: sea-darkness, the question of whether anything can be “blacker” than one’s sorrows, the sense that the world has a deeper shade of night reserved for certain hearts. “La Cigarra” doesn’t ask to be comforted; it asks to be understood.
And that is where Linda Ronstadt becomes the perfect vessel. As GRAMMY.com notes, she made Canciones de Mi Padre by revisiting the music of her childhood roots—songs tied to family memory and identity, not to whatever was “safe” for the market. When she sings “La Cigarra,” you don’t hear a tourist in tradition. You hear an interpreter who knows the difference between technique and truth. Her phrasing is disciplined, but the feeling is volcanic underneath—controlled heat, the kind that comes from respecting the song too much to oversell it.
There’s also a quiet, almost philosophical sting to the title itself. A cicada’s life—its long waiting underground, its brief, blazing season of sound—mirrors what many people eventually learn about love and loss: we spend years building the self, and then a single season can change everything. The song seems to say that beauty is not always a gift; sometimes it’s a reminder that nothing lasts. Even joy can arrive wearing mourning clothes.
So if “La Cigarra (The Cicada)” leaves you thoughtful, it’s because it asks for a rare kind of listening: not the listening that seeks distraction, but the listening that accepts memory’s weight. In Ronstadt’s hands—within an album that made history—this old Mexican standard becomes more than a performance. It becomes a small, solemn ceremony: a voice honoring the past, warning the heart, and letting the cicada sing just long enough for us to recognize ourselves in the sound.