Natalia Lafourcade

Cannes, July 2021. Leos Carax opens the festival with Annette, and in the middle of a night scene a Mexican police officer confronts a frantic Adam Driver who is singing a cappella. That officer was Natalia Lafourcade. For many European critics the cameo seemed like a strange casting choice, but for any fan of Latin American cinema it was a logical confirmation.

Lafourcade never understood her songs as mere radio-friendly products. Her arrangements have always functioned like cinematic scripts full of atmosphere, close-up shots and dramatic silences.

The daughter of musicians, she grew up in Coatepec surrounded by string instruments and treble clefs. In 1998, she joined a manufactured teen group called Twist, an industry experience that lasted less than a year and served as her inoculation against cardboard-cutout pop.

In 2002 she released her self-titled debut, and the single En el 2000 exploded on music television across Latin America. She was barely seventeen, with a green guitar and a lyrical sharpness that unsettled executives used to docile balladeers.

Nobody saw that detour coming.

The industry expected a successor to the teen pop divas of the time, but she chose to form a garage band called La Forquetina and lock herself away to write rock with analog keyboards.

Dismantling the Commercial Formula

In 2004, director Fernando Eimbcke commissioned her to write the main version of the soundtrack for Duck Season. She adapted the Brazilian classic O Pato with a minimal pulse that fit perfectly with the film's black-and-white look, showing that her ear worked far from bloated pop choruses.

Two years later, she disbanded her group at the height of its sales. She turned down lucrative sponsorship contracts to leave for Canada alone for nearly a year, with a notebook and a portable recorder.

That retreat gave rise to Hu Hu Hu in 2009, a work orchestrated with xylophones, bells and wind arrangements that baffled commercial radio stations. Sales fell sharply compared with her first album. But the independent press applauded the courage to bury the youthful image in exchange for a distinct identity free of production filters.

The decisive turning point came in 2012, when she decided to pay tribute to Agustín Lara with Mujer divina. She gathered rock musicians to tear apart boleros from the 1930s, and the result brought the classic songbook back to dance halls.

In 2015 she recorded Hasta la raíz at El Ganzo studios in Los Cabos. Produced alongside Cachorro López, the album dispensed with unnecessary digital layers to focus all the tension on an acoustic quartet. The album won five Latin Grammy Awards in a single night and established her as the undisputed songwriting benchmark in Spanish-language music.

And the gimmick was buried.

The Discipline of Analog Studio Work

In 2017, Pixar reached out to her to perform Remember Me in the Spanish-language version of the animated feature Coco. In March 2018, she took the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles to perform the song alongside Gael García Bernal and Miguel during the Oscars ceremony.

Rather than use Hollywood's spotlight to move to California, she returned to Veracruz. She teamed up with Los Macorinos, the two veteran guitarists who played with Chavela Vargas, to record the two volumes of Musas in 2017 and 2018. The goal was simply to capture the wood and air of the strings in live takes, with no clapper and no computer-cloned tracks.

So in 2022, she took the most demanding step of her career with the album De todas las flores. She brought in producer Adan Jodorowsky and they traveled to Texas to work at Sonic Ranch studios.

They worked exclusively with twenty-four-track analog tape. Recording was completed in twelve calendar days using Neumann tube condenser microphones arranged in a semicircle, with the entire band playing together in the same room, and four performance errors were kept intact on the final master tape.