Natalia Lafourcade started her career as a pop singer in a Mexican girl group, but somewhere on her way to a solo career she turned left into folk music, which is where I found her, and became one of the most accomplished musical auteurs of her generation. Her latest, Cancionera, pays homage to the golden age of Mexican cinema, with its dramatic and emotional songscapes, but still features a lot of the earthy acoustic grooves that support her vocals on earlier, folkier releases like Musas. This is a musician at the peak of her powers, modulating all of the creative and technical prowess that’s been a constant in her output through the experience and good judgement that comes to some of us around our fortieth year (I’m still waiting for it to arrive…) She’s also at a point where anyone she might want to work with is going to leap at the chance, and she has some extraordinarily skilled musicians working with her here. Adán Jodorowsky (son of Alejandro) produces, which is a nice link to one of my other passions, since his father wrote The Incal, among my favourite comics, as well as being a storied movie director. I don’t know Jodorowsky fils’s work, but I know he’s very well-regarded. This isn’t a ‘producer record’, however—he stays well out of the way, and lets atmosphere emerge organically from the writing and performances. Latin song traditions can sound melodramatic to English-language ears, but there’s something about Lafourcade’s voice production and approach to melody that makes it feel thoroughly direct and authentic, emotionally. This is a beautiful record, and it’s going to stay with me for a long while.
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