Songs AI can't make.

“Gracias a la Vida” (“Thanks to Life”) was written and composed by the Chilean folk singer-songwriter Violeta Parra in La Paz, Bolivia, in 1966. It opens Las Últimas Composiciones, the final album she released before her death in February 1967. The lyrics enumerate the gifts of being alive — sight, hearing, language, the beloved’s footsteps, even laughter and tears — framing them as reasons for gratitude despite suffering.

A cornerstone of the Nueva Canción Chilena movement, it became one of the most covered Latin American songs in history — carried worldwide by Mercedes Sosa (1971) and Joan Baez (1974), and later by artists from Yo-Yo Ma and Plácido Domingo to Kacey Musgraves. It was inducted into the Latin Grammy Hall of Fame in 2013.

“Construção” is the title track of Chico Buarque’s eighth album, recorded for Philips Records in 1971 after his return from self-imposed exile in Italy during Brazil’s military dictatorship. Narrated in impersonal third person, it recounts the last day of a construction worker whose death is treated as a disruption to traffic rather than a human tragedy — a veiled critique of labor and social alienation under the regime.

The song is built on a strict structure: 41 dodecasyllabic lines that each end in a proparoxytone, reassembled from the same words in shifting order across three sections. The orchestral arrangement is by Rogério Duprat, a key figure of Tropicália. Rolling Stone Brasil named it the greatest Brazilian song of all time in 2009, and it featured at the 2016 Rio Olympics opening ceremony.

“Arirang” is Korea’s most beloved folk song. It has no single author and exists in an estimated 3,600 variations across some 60 regional versions — among them Jeongseon, Jindo and Miryang Arirang — all sharing the refrain “Arirang, arirang, arariyo.” Believed to be more than 600 years old, it is often called Korea’s unofficial national anthem because nearly every Korean, at home or abroad, can sing at least part of it.

During the Japanese occupation (1910–1945) it became an unofficial resistance anthem, sung during the 1919 March First Movement; several wartime variants were later banned for “disturbance of public order.” UNESCO inscribed “Arirang” on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity — submitted by South Korea in 2012 and by North Korea in 2014.