For the new album, Lafourcade looked up an old friend, Adán Jodorowsky — a son of the avant-garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky — once a neighbor of hers in Mexico City. The younger Jodorowsky, a filmmaker, actor and musician, was equally ambitious about the project. “I wanted her to go beyond countries, beyond nationalities, beyond identity,” he said on the phone from Mexico City. He pushed her to invite edgy, accomplished players like the guitarist Marc Ribot, the bassist Sebastian Steinberg (Soul Coughing, Fiona Apple) and the French percussionist Cyril Atef; they agreed.
To that core, Natalia added another local connection, the 20-year-old Dorantes, who had taken a harpsichord class with her father. She first saw him play at Cauz, a small jazz club in Xalapa. “I asked Natalia, are you sure you want this young guy playing with Marc Ribot and Sebastian Steinberg, and she said, ‘Yes, he’s a genius,’” Jodorowsky said.
Lafourcade and Jodorowsky decided from the beginning to avoid the electronic trappings of contemporary recording, opting to lay down the tracks live on analog tape in a Texas border town near El Paso. “It’s so organic, you can feel the quality of the tape when she sings,” said Jodorowsky, who also decided not to use a click track or metronome to keep the tempo.
“At times pop, or modern, music — not that it’s rigid, but it has very predetermined structures,” mused Lafourcade, pausing as she did many times in our conversation to find the precise thought. She mentioned Miles Davis’s “Kind of Blue” and “Sketches of Spain” as inspirations, music that generated warmth for her during the pandemic.
While Ribot, Steinberg and Atef reflect Lafourcade’s transnational aspirations, her music retains a deeply felt Latin American aesthetic. Ribot’s magisterial playing, with occasional forays into downtown skronk, has been informed by his intimacy with Cuban son and buttressed by previous experiments with his early 2000s band Los Cubanos Postizos and the spirit of the Haitian guitarist Frantz Casseus, his late teacher.
