“Final” (Ultra)

By: Ben Ratliff

A lot of songwriters — most, nearly all — lose the gift of sweetness and concision over time. In the process of growing older and more eminent, more trenchant or more convoluted, it becomes harder to write, or even to want to write, three-and-a-half-minute songs that seem as if they have fallen from the sky.

The Cuban singer-songwriter Pedro Luis Ferrer — who is also adept at the tres, the Cuban guitar with three pairs of like-tuned strings — is a serious exception. Now 61, he was associated with the island’s folk-pop nueva trova movement of the 1970s and wrote songs that were sometimes excellently disgruntled, metaphorical, humanist observations; they got him into decades of trouble with the authorities.

Since 2005, he’s been making records from his home in Havana and releasing them to the world market, relying on a greater audience outside of Cuba. His newest, “Final,” is distributed in the United States by the electronic dance-music label Ultra.

On “Final,” as in his last few albums, his poetic verses generally come in traditional song forms and ensemble styles — guaracha, changüí, son — made stronger with sophisticated chord changes. Even when he adds arrangements beyond guitar, voice, and percussion — some synthesized strings on “Cristina” and “Reitiración,” for instance — he’s reducing to an ever lighter essence, direct and sublime. “Final” is given over to lyrics about distant muses, beneficent ghosts, the nature of beauty, how we encapsulate a person’s life and how we anticipate its end.

As with his past several albums, he has enlisted the close cooperation of Lena Ferrer, his daughter, who plays percussion and sings harmony. To leave their collaboration at that is to undersell it severely: The combination of their voices, at their best, is one of the most satisfying sounds in the music of the Americas, clear and precise and symbiotic, expressing complicated ideas that are often counterintuitively or uncategorizably wise.

In “Dicen de Ti, Dicen de Mi,” arranged for only two voices, guitar and clave, the father and daughter sing about how people often minimize or exaggerate women’s lives — their beauty, their sadness. But then the singers notice: “Some very ordinary events in this life/look very weird.” And then they proclaim:

People live on sad stories

as if they knew something they wouldn’t say.

And women play the roles

that dilettantes designed for them.