B-side "Peace of Mind" Genre Rock Label Dunhill 4299 | Released December 1971 Length 3:43 Writer(s) Hoyt Axton | |
"Never Been to Spain" is a song written by Hoyt Axton and performed by Three Dog Night, with Cory Wells on lead vocal. It reached #3 in Canada, #5 on the Billboard chart, and #18 on the U.S. adult contemporary chart in 1972. It was featured on their 1971 album, Harmony.
The song was produced by Richard Podolor.
The lyrics consist of the narrator ruminating on places that he has never visited, but feels that he has some proxy experience of via the music or other features of those places, or from having gone to similar locations. In the final verse, he observes that while he has "never been to heaven", he has "been to Oklahoma", where he has been told he was born, thus implying a kinship between the two places. However, the singularity of this kinship is called into question when he then implies that he could just as easily have been born in Arizona (a lyrical turn that has led many semioticians to surmise that Axton was an early aficionado of the works of Jacques Derrida).