With her first album in five years, the Mexican songwriter embraces a new sound, and sings bluntly about her struggles.
The Mexican songwriter Carla Morrison had a thriving career in 2017. With her pure soprano, her unabashedly vulnerable songs and constant touring, she had steadily built an audience among Spanish-speaking listeners across the Americas and Europe. Her songs had won Latin Grammy Awards and her first two full-length albums, “Déjenme Llorar” (2012) and “Amor Supremo” (2015), were nominated for Grammys. Morrison was on the road, performing at theaters and festivals following the release of “Amor Supremo Desnudo,” an album of radically altered acoustic remakes of the songs from “Amor Supremo.” Concertgoers were singing along with every word. And she was miserable.
“I was on tour and I was hating it,” she said. “And I wanted to make music and I was hating it. And I just had no songs to offer.”
That’s why it has taken five years for Morrison to release a new album out Friday, “El Renacimiento,” which can be translated as “The Renaissance” or “The Rebirth.” In her new songs, Morrison, 35, reveals both her paralyzing anxiety and her newfound strength. The album’s opening song, “Hacia Dentro” (“To See Within”), begins with Morrison singing “One day I woke up numb/Without the desire to keep going.” And it concludes with the hymnlike, uplifting “Encontrarme” (“Finding Myself”), which vows, “Even if it hurts when I touch/I will heal with time.”
Morrison was relaxed and smiling in a video call from her home in a suburb of Los Angeles, where she settled in 2021 after marrying her longtime boyfriend and co-producer, Alejandro Jiménez. The piano she writes songs on was just over her shoulder. But in 2017, she recalled, “I just was kind of like, ‘What am I?’ All those questions that we as human beings ask ourselves: ‘What am I here for? What was I born for? What’s my purpose?’ I was just so uninterested, and at some point a little bit suicidal as well,” she said.
“I remember thinking that I just didn’t know my value whatsoever,” she continued. “I just felt like everybody just wanted a piece of me, but nobody really wanted to know me.”
Morrison’s songs have never held back on emotion. Her first EP — the skeletal, self-produced “Aprendiendo a Aprender” (“Learning to Learn”) in 2009 — opened with “Lagrimas” (“Tears”), presaging a catalog of songs filled with loneliness, yearning, devotion and heartache.
“In every one of my albums, I’ve always tried to be very honest and to give a space to people that feel like nobody understands them,” she said. “I have a feeling that if I hadn’t been a singer-songwriter, I’d probably have been a psychologist or a therapist.”
Morrison was born in Tecate, Mexico, a border town in Baja California, and she grew up hearing both traditional Mexican rancheras and American and British pop and rock. She lived in Phoenix for part of her teens. “I do feel very Mexican in my core, but at the same time, I feel very gringa,” she said. “But all of my songs, if you sing them like rancheras, they would totally make sense. Rancheras always tell you a story. The lyrics are very, very honest. There’s no shame if you feel something or expose it.”
Morrison’s early recordings presented her as a pop-folk singer-songwriter, relying on guitar and keyboards. Her first full-length album, the largely acoustic “Déjenme Llorar” (“Let Me Cry”), in 2012, went platinum in Mexico and won a Latin Grammy as best alternative music album. Just three years later, Morrison transfigured her sound with “Amor Supremo,” deploying hefty rock beats and reverberant keyboards for songs about obsessive love. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Latin Pop Albums chart. As Morrison promoted it, she agreed to perform acoustic versions of the songs for radio stations and webcasts; eventually, she decided to rework all of the songs, adding two new ones, for “Amor Supremo Desnudo.”
But when her 2017 tour was over, Morrison upended everything. She dropped her Mexican management company and stopped touring for the first time since her debut. With Jiménez, she moved from Mexico to Paris in 2019. They passed auditions to enroll at a music conservatory in a Paris suburb, where Morrison studied jazz singing; it was her first formal music education after a decade as an award-winning songwriter. She immersed herself in Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and, surrounded by fellow musicians, she also eased back into writing songs.
“Carla was starting to feel much better,” Jiménez said in a separate interview. “I remember the day she wrote something and she showed the song to me and I was like, Wow! It had been such a long time since she had not only written something but was excited about music again. She had the same old Carla energy.”
As the pandemic began in 2020, Morrison got an unexpected message: Ricky Martin was looking for songs. Morrison and Jiménez sent some possibilities; from the demos, Martin chose to collaborate on one and invited Morrison to share lead vocals and Jiménez to produce. The result is “Recuerdo,” which appeared on Martin’s 2020 quarantine EP, “Pausa,” and has been streamed 16 million times on YouTube alone.
In Paris, working on songs during quarantine isolation, Morrison was ready to change her sound again. “For the longest time, I felt very pressured to keep my guitar close,” she said. “I felt very pressured to be this singer-songwriter, because I know people love that side of me. But I also was like, ‘No! I listen to Adele, to Sam Smith, to Billie Eilish, to Ariana Grande, to Dua Lipa.’ And I was like, ‘I really want to channel that. I just want to go pop. And I don’t want to be afraid.’”
Where “Amor Supremo” used the gravity and spaciousness of rock, “El Renacimiento” has the surreal depths and computer-aided transparency of 21st-century pop, with close-up vocals, programmed beats and enveloping ambiences: the kind of music that could be concocted while working in isolation in Paris. “We had a whole different perspective,” Jiménez said. “We were not competing with anyone else — we were just trying to do our thing.”
In September 2020, Morrison released the first single from “El Renacimiento”: “Ansiedad” (“Anxiety”). Over pulsing, hide-and-seek chords, she sings about panic attacks: “I want to speak and I can’t/I want to breathe and I can’t.”
But the chord progression ascends and the beat is crisp and confident “I thought if I were to listen to the song, I would like for the beat to make me forget I’m having an anxiety attack,” Morrison said. “I would like for the beat to make me think, ‘OK, I’m getting out of this.’”
Morrison weathered another bout of depression in 2021 after losing her father to Covid-19. She got treatment with ketamine infusions at a clinic in Los Angeles. “I had a ton of epiphanies,” she said. “The next day I woke up and I thought, ‘What’s missing? Something’s missing.’ And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’m not scared, I’m not sad.’ I just felt at peace.”
Fans have told Morrison they are grateful to hear songs about her struggles. “There aren’t many songs about mental health in Spanish,” Morrison said. “In the Latin community, we don’t allow ourselves to be vulnerable, because then you’re weak. Or if you think about mental health, you’re crazy — just drink a beer, calm down, relax. We don’t face these problems because we weren’t taught.”
Morrison has made her way back to performing. Last year, she played a full-length livestream concert. And as a lead-up to the album release this spring, she has been performing at arenas in Mexico, opening for what she names as her “favorite band”: Coldplay.
Onstage, on tour, with fans shouting along, Morrison felt joy again. “In the industry, I get this space where I am so honest, and so vulnerable, and very intense at times,” she said. “I feel like people get that from my music. I do feel like I’ve really tried to be that space of freedom. And as long as I’m honest, I’ll be happy.”
Source: Music - nytimes.com
