Agridulce literally combines agrio (sour) and dulce (sweet), creating the vivid meaning “bittersweet.” In the song, it describes the mixed emotions carried by the music as the singer reflects on love, distance, sadness, and change.
Ana Tijoux’s “A Veces” (“Sometimes”) moves through the uncertainty of relationships and of being yourself. The repeated lines, “A veces tienes que hacer contigo las paces” [Sometimes you have to make peace with yourself] and “Te levantas y te caes” [You get up and you fall], give the song its center: life keeps changing, and self-acceptance is something you have to work on again and again. The phrase hacer las paces is an idiom meaning “to make peace,” but here the person you need to make peace with is yourself. Even the opening, “A veces enlaces, tropiezo sin pases” [Sometimes connections, I stumble without passes], sounds like playful, broken wordplay about trying to connect while losing your way.
The song refuses to make love simple. “A veces te quiero, a veces no” [Sometimes I love you, sometimes I don’t] is blunt, while “A veces te quiero lejos de mí” [Sometimes I want you far from me] sits beside “A veces me da pena solo el verte partir” [Sometimes it makes me sad just to see you leave]. As the narrator grows older, things become more complicated, and she sometimes wishes she could become “the past” or “desaparecer del mapa” [disappear from the map]. The lyrics jump between affection, distance, mistakes, control slipping away, tears at dawn, and the bittersweet sound of a viola. That constant return to “a veces” [sometimes] makes contradiction the point: sometimes it is Tuesday, sometimes the 13th, sometimes “you,” sometimes “me,” sometimes yes, sometimes no. And after all those changes, the song returns to the same clear image: “A veces te levantas y te caes” [Sometimes you get up and you fall].