Natalia Lafourcade walks onstage in the setting Virginia sun, her black gown’s massive skirt clutched in her hand. She’s a solemn, almost funerary vision as she reaches center stage, her eight-piece band looking on. The dress parachutes around her as if it has a life of its own. She sits, guitar in hand, and a hush falls over the Wolf Trap amphitheater. “A este mundo vine solita /Solita me voy a morir,” Lafourcade sings, her voice soaring up toward the wooden rafters: “Into this world I came alone /Alone I am going to die.”
The song, “Vine Solita” (“I Came Alone”), which she sings accompanied by only a sparse piano melody and her own guitar, is the first track from her latest album, “De Todas las Flores” (“Of All the Flowers”). This is Lafourcade’s first tour in five years, and her first stop in the United States. Over the course of the two-hour-plus show, she will die and be reborn.
Much like the Mexican-born singer-songwriter’s career — Lafourcade has built a community of fans throughout Latin America and diasporic communities around the world — the album and its 17-stop tour embody a new vision of borderless musical creation. Throughout the show, she takes her audience on imaginative journeys: “Imagine you’re a bird with giant wings … we’re going to fly to Oaxaca … now we’re in the beach in Veracruz.”
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At 39, Lafourcade is among the most successful artists in Spanish-language music, known for her measured, honest songwriting and her covers of Latin American, especially Mexican, folk songs. She holds the distinction of being the female artist with the most Latin Grammys — 14 — and has produced 10 albums in a little over two decades, collaborating with Latin American pop and rock superstars such as Julieta Venegas and Jorge Drexler, and with legendary Mexican guitar duo Los Macorinos.
During a Zoom interview in Spanish earlier this month, Lafourcade said she had spent the day working and resting in Paris after kicking off the European leg of her tour with a performance at the oldest music hall in the city, the legendary L’Olympia. She was spending a couple of nights in the French capital, the same city where she spent the beginning of 2022 mastering her latest album and where, in a small bar, she first debuted “De Todas las Flores” to an unsuspecting audience.
Her afternoon included a quick trip to the Fête des Tuileries, a seasonal fair nestled in the heart of Paris’s first arrondissement. “I went to get on a ride that spun me across the sky,” she said, referring to a massive, over-160-foot ride that towers over the Jardin des Tuileries during summer months.
Soon, she would head to Spain for stints in Madrid and Barcelona before eventually making her Wolf Trap debut.
“It’s very exciting. People are receiving the music with lots of care, with lots of love,” Lafourcade said of the tour. “It’s something that brings me joy because I feel this album is not an easy album. ‘De Todas las Flores’ is music that grabs you, that lays bare your soul, that lays bare your heart, because it comes from a place of openness, no?”
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The album resists easy classification, spanning genres such as Latin folk and jazz, son jarocho, bossa nova, cumbia and bolero. It also marks Lafourcade’s first collection of original music since 2015’s “Hasta la Raíz” (“To the Root”), an intimate, alternative folk-driven record which was certified double platinum in Mexico. In the seven years since, she released four tribute albums to icons of Latin American music, bringing artists such as Agustín Lara, Violeta Parra Sandoval and Álvaro Carrillo back into the mainstream.
Share this articleShare“De Todas las Flores” has roots all over — in Veracruz, in Paris and in Texas, where it was recorded by Lafourcade and a team of international musicians at Sonic Ranch — and positions itself at the heart of a vibrant conversation between Lafourcade and bastions of Latin American folk music. She cites Simón Díaz, María Grever, Parra Sandoval and Lara among her inspirations for the album.
But Lafourcade remains an artist connected to her own experiences, to what she calls “the source.” “I think one of the primary ingredients in this album was intuition,” she says. The result was a 12-song record that is primarily concerned with universal, transcendent truths.
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It asks listeners to straddle the boundaries between pain and joy, death and life. In “Muerte” (“Death”), for example, Lafourcade’s voice soars over a jazz guitar as she recites, “I give thanks to death /For teaching me to live … This war inside me dies /I am reborn grateful” in the style of a spoken-word poem. At the same time, “Mi Manera de Querer” (“My Way of Loving”), an upbeat samba-jazz love song in which Lafourcade celebrates love without gender, finds her telling a lover that they’re made of light “from head to toe.”
Onstage, both songs are a triumph: “Mi Manera de Querer” is a welcome interlude of effervescent joy, and “Muerte” a testament to Lafourcade’s theatricality as she is seemingly possessed by the very death she sings of, dancing and writhing on the floor along with the song’s swirling instrumentation.
“De Todas las Flores” invites a different kind of intimacy than the exuberant “Hasta la Raíz” precisely because it is a product of its time. For Lafourcade, as for many others, the past few years were complex. They brought with them the death of loved ones and a heightened awareness of death’s inevitability. “I think knowing that is good for you,” she says. “I know that I will have times of life and times of darkness, and that I’m going to have times of life and times of death until death comes, but that’s apparently a type of death, no? In reality, we’re something else, too.”
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That awareness meant that death is more present on “De Todas las Flores” than any other album Lafourcade has written. The focus on existential questions wasn’t intentional. To an extent, she said, songs have the autonomy to appear as an album is being written and say “Here I am.”
Writing the new album, Lafourcade says, “was like rediscovering areas of my internal garden, of rediscovering rooms and homes in a place that I hadn’t visited in a while, or that I visited for a moment, and then I forgot existed.” When she started working on it in 2018, she revisited dozens of forgotten voice memos in her phone. The album, she said, was forged in part by “visiting the past, visiting those memories, visiting those songs that already existed.”
The bulk of this memorial exercise, the “return to the pages of a diary,” took place at Lafourcade’s family home in Veracruz, where she sought refuge during the pandemic and rejuvenation after years of relentless touring. The homecoming precipitated a return to herself and her interiority. Slowly, “De Todas las Flores” came together.
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By the time Lafourcade closes her Wolf Trap show with a jubilant array of hit songs — including the diamond certified cumbia “Nunca es Suficiente” (“It’s Never Enough”) — she has taken her audience through a moving tour of both “De Todas las Flores” and a selection of Latin American folk standards. Her powerful rendition of the iconic Mexican regional ballad, “La Llorona” (“The Weeping Woman”), is nothing short of spectacular, as her voice stretches to the point of near-straining, only to lift higher with each of the song’s heart-wrenching laments.
Since shedding her black gown in a fitful moment of onstage catharsis, Lafourcade has emerged in a pale blue cotton caftan, reborn. “Thank you to everyone for coming,” she says in her closing speech, encouraging her audience to practice “beautiful love.”
“Long live love. Long live music. Long live this party, it’s for all of you. Until next time.”
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