Spain from a Backpack. Mark Pearson

here, I’m singing classic American rock songs and playing guitar in the subway. My stage is the longest passageway in the entire metro network, without the typical moving sidewalks that would drown out my acoustic guitar and ruin my chances of eating the supper I’m singing for.

      A short, elderly woman, wearing an oversized mink coat that swishes lazily against her hips, drops a coin in the guitar case at my feet. A group of rowdy boys walks by behind her and starts singing in mumbled approximations of English words. I dance with them for a moment, not caring if they throw some coins my way. After all, I’m a metro musician in Madrid, and I am living a dream.

      I’ve always had a peculiar fascination with the concept of imposing music on a disinterested, passive crowd. When I visited New York City, I spent nearly an entire day in Times Square listening to a Boyz II Men wannabe band belt out gospel standards in four-part harmonies. Years later, I went to Montreal and ended up following around a street performer who banged away on a cheap acoustic guitar in minus-10-degree weather, singing pop tunes for drunken college students. Neither was that good. It was the idea of playing to the unknown faces of the casual passersby that attracted me.

      After all, I’m a metro musician in Madrid, and I am living a dream.

      Now it’s my junior year abroad in Madrid, and I’ve discovered metro musicians: Eastern Europeans slinging accordions and car-hopping metro trains; gypsy vocalists singing off-key a capella through karaoke amplifiers; a German opera singer wailing in dissonant harmonies that can be heard over metro rumblings two cars away. My dream, once an idle fascination, is staring me in the face. Every station I walk through, every street corner in the center of Madrid, every empty bench in every park looks to me like a potential stage. Spaces like these simply don’t exist in my hometown in Pennsylvania.