Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan”

From the outset, I was drawn to how it starts: upright bass, guitar, and tres announcing themselves as a singular strum in Dm—their different timbres twining together to create a sense of density no instrument could achieve alone. The moment conveyed sheer rootedness, as if the tendrils of a towering tree had inched a little further down into the earth. I heard it and thought home.

Buena Vista Social Club’s “Chan Chan” first suffused my headphones in 2009, as I labored to complete my master’s thesis on Denis Johnson. Back then, I needed more motivation than a deadline could instill, and found it at a new coffee shop that served the most divine chai lattes—a balanced interplay of comforting creaminess and spicy complexity. “Chan Chan” magnified that warmth. It’s a cozy song, grounded with winking nomadic traces. The tres brightly sashays around the earthier bass and guitar while the clave pattern beckons them all home.

That dynamic—journey and return—sounded dazzling at the time. By that point, I’d set off a pattern that involved moving far more than any person should. I’d already undertaken five moves in seven years, slowly escalating to what the grotesque ratio would eventually become. With each transition, I sought out a sense of belonging I thought I could stumble upon rather than build. Hearing “Chan Chan” helped me discern what dropping my anchor might actually feel like. It was pure steadiness, not stagnancy.

Compay Segundo originally wrote the song in 1984 after dreaming the notes. The melody was a gift. For the lyrics, he looked to tradition, basing them on a farmer’s song he used to hear as a child: about a couple’s outing to the beach to collect sand. When he joined the ensemble Buena Vista over a decade later, the group used it as the first track on their eponymous album—their version made richer by each member’s masterful history playing Cuban son. That authority settles into the track as lived-in ease—something I dreamed about finding for myself.

“Chan Chan” is a string-heavy arrangement. But my favorite moment arrives shortly before the three-minute mark, when a trumpet suddenly bursts forth. The first time I heard it, that turn was a true surprise, as if the clouds had parted to let the sun steep the world in a transcendent glow. Subsequent listens didn’t yield the same novelty, and yet the trumpet’s appearance always delivered a welcome revelry. After the tres, guitar, and bass had circled and circled, here was a glorious salute of their return. Fanfare of a different kind.

Even though “Chan Chan” led me to the feeling I wanted to inhabit, constructing it in reality would be a far different story. Learning how to stay—that harder problem—would dog me for another 15 years. Still, “Chan Chan” offered a glimpse of what I aimed for, signifying a sonic consistency even as everything else kept shifting. For years, it’s been a pocket-sized sanctuary I’ve carried with me, as I wandered and searched and eventually learned that home was never a place I’d find on a map but a seed I needed to plant within.