Global Beat: Natalia Lafourcade
For Mexican folk superstar Natalia Lafourcade, music is still nothing short of magic. And since she was young, she’s been grateful to serve as a channel to transmit that magic out into the world.
“Music is a totally spiritual and wonderful journey, not just entertainment,” she says today, from her Mexico City apartment. “My mother taught me to open myself to this magic. You never know when it will come through you.”
Thankfully, for Lafourcade, attuning herself to that magic has catapulted her to become one of Mexico’s most beloved singers and songwriters. Her songs—timeless, lovelorn gems leaning heavily on Mexico’s folk-music traditions—have been streamed billions of times. And Lafourcade knows it’s not just the music that enchants us listeners—it’s the mystery, the wonder inspired by enigmatic performers like Nina Simone, Edith Piaf and Mexican icon Chavela Vargas.
Her latest album, Cancionera, is an ode to that long line of magic artists—a collection of gorgeously arranged, stripped down original songs and updates of traditional Mexican tunes recorded live, in one take. “Cancionera” translates to “songstress” in English, but encapsulates the jaw-dropping, time-standing-still awe we feel when we see a singer channel magic from, as Lafourcade says, “who knows where.”
Lafourcade was born in Mexico City, but raised in the small town of Coatepec in the coastal, coffee-growing Veracruz region. Her mother was a music educator and her father was a pianist and organ builder.
“I grew up with the sea, the jungle and the bosque de niebla [cloud forest], which is very magical,” she remembers. “I love nature. But the music influenced me so much. Our community was always together, people playing from their homes, so many styles—from classical to jazz, boleros and Son Jarocho [the harp-and-guitar style native to Veracruz].”
Lafourcade traveled back to Mexico City to study music but dropped out after signing a deal with Sony Music. That was 2002; she was only 17. By 2005, she’d won a Latin Grammy. Lafourcade was a star. While her earliest work encased her powerful voice in sweet pop-rock songs, by the 2020s she was digging more intently into the traditional, timeless musical styles she grew up with.
Her Cancionera project began with a mystical discovery. It was lockdown-era COVID times, and Lafourcade needed to escape the heaviness of Mexico City. She camped out in a family friend’s ranch in Veracruz to decompress and see what flowed—and quickly began writing melodies on the house’s piano.
“I only found out later—that piano had been a gift from my mother, years ago,” she says. “That was the first spark of the album telling me: ‘The spirit of this music is coming; don’t think too much.’”
Those instrumentals now bookend Cancionera; the songs between them had a very different birth. In 2024, Lafourcade was staring at her 40th birthday and feeling the mortality that comes with such a milestone. She reflected on the path she’d already traversed and the path she had yet to walk. Those musings peaked while she was, maybe inconveniently, hosting friends in her Mexico City apartment.
“We had friends here, so I sat in the closet and wrote these lyrics and melody. There was a message coming to me as I was about to cross the line into a new decade,” she remembers. “And I thought about all the cancioneros and cancioneras in the world who have inspired me so much to be who I am.”
She emerged with Cancionera’s title track—a slow, beautiful, pensive ode to a long lineage of powerful performers that’s translated as, “Cancionera, always, always sing your truth/ Be a woman/ The beautiful muse/ Be the star of a life that lights up upon seeing your steps.”
To record the album, Lafourcade hoped to recreate the feeling of those intimate performances she grew up adoring. And she wanted to complete it before she turned 41, which, by the time all of her songs were written, was just three months away. Lafourcade gathered a crew of incredible musicians at Sony Studios in Mexico City. For 12 days, the group zeroed in on these 14 compositions—letting magic flow through them. There’s no studio tricks, no overdubs, just Lafourcade channeling the spirits of all the cancioneras who came before her to guide her voice—the famous, beloved icons and the singers who never made it out of Coatepec but shaped her nonetheless.
The tracks you hear today were captured in one room, in one take—and the intimacy is apparent. Listen closely and you can hear the pianos sigh or Lafourcade exhale. You’re there with her in the studio; you’re there with her generations ago in some tiny theater in Veracruz. On “Luna Creciente,” instrumental guitar duo Hermanos Gutiérrez add a quivering, desert glimmer to Lafourcade’s whispered singing about life’s loneliest nights. On “Mascaritas de Cristal,” her voice is staggering and delicate, demanding a lover to drop his “crystal mask” so she can see his truth.
As they recorded, Lafourcade fully stepped into her own version of the cancionera archetype—a woman of magic and mystery. And, luckily, she got it all on film. As they recorded these intimate songs, videographers were on hand to capture it all up close. A few of those videos, like “Luna Creciente,” are already out now.
Cancionera was released in May, and Lafourcade will take her show on the road through the fall. And she’ll continue to evolve, live on stage—inviting listeners to as well.
“We human beings have so many characters and personalities inside ourselves,” she says. “We don’t show them all to everyone. That’s the path of the cancionera but really of all human beings. We are constantly transforming.”
