San Francisco Frontiers - New Natalia Lafourcade album celebrates music's onstage evolutions

"Live at Carnegie Hall," out Thursday, is the recording of a shimmering Lafourcade performance in October 2022 at the legendary New York music venue.

It was there two years ago that she debuted her most recent studio album "De Todas Las Flores" ("Of All The Flowers"), featuring cameos from stars including David Byrne, Omara Portuondo and Jorge Drexler.

The raw, deeply personal work scored both a Grammy and a Latin Grammy, yet another feather in the cap of the internationally acclaimed 40-year-old.

Singing live onstage is part of giving a song to its audience, she told AFP in a recent interview -- a moment when it ceases to be hers alone.

"I just feel like I was there to give the chance to this song to exist itself," Lafourcade said, referring in particular to "Hasta La Raiz," a hit about her Mexican roots and homeland, which was on her breakthrough studio album of the same name.

In offering it to an audience, Lafourcade says it becomes a piece of art to "remind us of something important -- that we all connect."

For her personally, "Hasta La Raiz" ("To The Root") serves as a reminder of home, "and that I can fly to anywhere, in any place that I can dream, and I can go far away from that place. But I have that, that root."

"I think that's important for many people for different reasons," Lafourcade said.

But the knowledge that her music will take on a life of its own is not part of her writing process, she said: "I try not to think, because that will step in the way of the song and the lyrics."

"Sometimes I just feel like music is just like, 'get out of the way, let me in!'" she exclaimed.

It is best to just get out of the way, she continued, "because then music surprises you."

- 'Our music' -

Lafourcade is one of Latin America's most decorated contemporary stars, with 18 Latin Grammys to her name -- the most of any female artist -- and is also a regular at the Recording Academy's Grammys.

The daughter of musicians grew up in the state of Veracruz, and got her start more than two decades ago in Mexico's alternative music scene, before leaning more traditional and becoming a steward of Mexican folk songs and standards.

Her genre-defiant work since then has featured inflections of pop, rock, jazz and Mexican regional folk including son jarocho ("Veracruz sound") -- and she's also turned to the classical world for inspiration.

In recent years, Lafourcade has joined forces with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and famed Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, playing shows at the Hollywood Bowl as well as, of course, Carnegie Hall.

She featured with Dudamel at a show at the New York venue this fall, and said playing with him and the orchestra "feels like flying."

"There's not so much rehearsal for the shows with Gustavo," she said, saying the emphasis is on seeing "how we react to that energy and people, and the place and the orchestra, and then there's my band."

Then, she said, "we can build something that is unique."

"It's a whole collaboration between universes."

Lafourcade has not given specifics on what's next for her winding career, but has indicated her new Carnegie live album both "represents a moment that marked my musical path" and "is also a bridge to a new stage."

She told AFP her inspirations these days include flamenco -- but she's never far from the sounds of her country, including son jarocho and the bolero genre of ballads.

"I am happy to see how Latin people, we feel proud of our roots and not shy to show it," she said, referring to the explosion in recent years of Latin music on streaming platforms.

"This is our music," she said, and "there's people from different places in the world paying attention."

B.Turner--SFF