all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care." All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs, and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the air-waves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil — the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here — so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering. Fort Worth-based band, the Quaker City Night Hawks, features a song called "Duendes" on their 2016 album "El Astronauta". Contemporary literature American novelist Ursula K. Le Guin published a poem entitled, "Lorca's Duende" (2011). Pulitzer prize winning poet Tracy K. Smith published a book of poetry about desire, entitled Duende (2018); the collection opens with a quote from Lorca about Duende. The Duende appears frequently in Giannina Braschi's poetry, drama, and philosophy. In Empire of Dreams, the Duende appears in pastoral poems as well as in the ars poetica ("Poetry is this screaming madwoman"). In her book United States of Banana, Braschi writes a lyric essay about the "Hierarchy of Inspiration", which features the Duende, Angel, Muse, and Daemon as distinct forces of artistic inspiration. She also published a treatise on the poet-artist about Lorca's treatment of the Duende. See also Flamenco "Three Might Be Duende" by They Might Be Giants, a song on the album Join Us. References Sources Hirsch, Edward (2003) The Demon and the Angel: