Sometimes (rarely) a small crack opens in the system and through it comes a light that can penetrate through the weeds and reach the hearts of people. This light is called De todos las flores, an album signed by Natalia Lafourcade, a work that turns its back on the laws of a current music market governed by immediacy, flash and chained stimuli.
Of All Flowers has gradually grown since its October 2022 edition until it became the winner of the Latin Grammys (the system) last week in Seville. He received three awards. Shakira, Karol G and Bizarrap also won three awards, some of which they shared with other artists. Lafourcade brought her in as a solo artist for an album that was created slowly over three years. A subtle, moving work with music that is not at the top of the list of listening platforms, consisting of long songs (half, half a dozen, longer than six minutes) and which arises from a deep pain, that of the protagonist, to… strangely spread joy to all who hear it.
On the day of the interview with this newspaper, last Wednesday, Natalia Lafourcade (Mexico City, 39 years old) is in Monterrey (Mexico), where she offers a new concert on the tour of this very special album. He sits in a bright place in his hotel room and talks to us via video call. “Yes, it’s a job that doesn’t suit his requirements. Jorge told me about it [Drexler] and Adam [Jodorowsky, productor del álbum] at the Grammy Gala that the victory was some kind of miracle. “It is. Of all the Flowers, which lasts an hour and six minutes and doesn’t let up, begins with a 1.30 minute violin introduction, then some guitar chords and only in the second minute does Lafourcade begin to sing the following: “ “I I am “I came into this world alone, I will die alone.” Everything is so suggestive and strange.
The Mexican singer with her three Latin Grammys on November 17th in Seville. It won the awards for Record of the Year, Singer-songwriter Album and Singer-songwriter Song. JON NAZCA (Portal)
The story of this magical album arises from deep pain and tells a lot about death in such a natural way that the listener ends up dancing with his own skull. “It’s not easy to hear, I know. It is a painful, personal, intimate and delicate inner dive. They are hard, strong lyrics, but also beautiful, generous, that tell about life, with its pain, but also with its part of light. I knew it wouldn’t be easy to be heard, but now the album told me, “Here I am, making my place.” There’s a point where I’m no longer in control. And that’s wonderful.”
In 2020, when the world stopped due to the pandemic, the Mexican artist noted that she had gone seven years (since Hasta la Root, 2015) without releasing a full album of new songs. During these years he had released four albums, but they were full of homages and versions and few of his own songs. Because of the detention, he decided to search his “cell phone” to see if he could find some songs there. “I have hundreds of audio notes. In fact, I lost a cell phone in a forest in Chile. It was a drama: two years of compositions in the trash. With the new phone, I continued composing while I was filming. And during the pandemic, I started traveling through all these audios and finding songs. “It was like a beautiful gift that music gave me.”
It wasn’t an easy task. There are a few recordings from 2018 that deal with a particularly bitter separation. He talks about the theme of some of these topics: “Vine Solita is about when you fall in love, when that person is no longer in your life… You feel pain in your chest, in your legs… It’s balanced hard to walk. It’s a physical pain. These moments are deaths in life and they lead me to consider that love must be self-love. I come into this world alone and I leave alone. It’s a pact with myself.” The eponymous song “Of all the Flowers” also comes from this time: “It’s about a garden full of colors, but then it looks withered.” The torment that you experience in a relationship can, and all the time we are in this atmosphere of fear until we decide to leave.”
Natalia Lafourcade performed at the Botánico Nights (Madrid) on July 9th last year. Patricia J. Garcinuno (WireImage)
Lafourcade had begun a dark, sometimes even dark, path of no return. An emotional shock. He dug into old wounds and pulled out broken things that he knew could never be repaired but that would bring him to a place of light. “It was a painful inner journey, but necessary to find healing,” he emphasizes. Some of the 12 songs on the album address this separation, but the path had to extend to the present. The Bolero runs wonderfully It is dedicated to his current partner. It is a tribute to the couple’s everyday life, in which he sings: “How nice it is to know that when I go far away, when I return, a hug is waiting in silence until I wake up.” His passion is for nature present in many parts of the album and highlights Llévame viento, inspired by his walks through the mountains of Ausangate in Cuzco, Peru. In the development of this story that the album represents, joy and a sense of humor also emerge, as in “My way of love” or “Canta a la arena”.
The work ends with “Que te far bonito Nicolás”, dedicated to his nephew, who died in a slip and fall in the mountains in 2021. He was 38 years old. It was the last song he composed. As I wrote, those were the days when Nicolás’ body could not be found. She interprets the piece as a dictation to her loved ones: as if her relatives were singing this song while Nicolás’ soul was being uplifted.
Death opens and closes the album. “Death is a part of life, even if we don’t want to see it. I think it’s important to develop the ability to talk about it. I live in the countryside [en Veracruz] and the cycles of nature show this very clearly. When you have the awareness that you are going to die, or that someone close to you is going to die, or that something is going to end, then you can appreciate what you are experiencing.” When recording, they also went the other way around and went old school : It was recorded on tape, with all the musicians together in one room and without sound effects. At the helm are renowned instrumentalists such as Marc Ribot, Emiliano Dorantes and Sebastian Steinberg, who create varied music: bossa nova, Mexican folklore, jazz, Caribbean flavors, Hawaiian allusions…
As he continues to present the album live, Lafourcade dreads the moment of facing another collection of new songs from this brilliant work. “I’m scared,” he laughs, emphasizing the syllables. “The good thing is that I already know this horror, this dizziness. And it is necessary. Because the thought “What should I do now?” puts me in a state of absolute humility. I firmly believe that music likes people’s humility. If you are humble, the music will look for you and I am confident we will meet again.”
And he ends with a confession: “One of the things I like to do to relieve stress is watching animal videos.” It’s my hobby. Images of owls giving each other love. “It’s an enormous generosity and tenderness.” Generosity, the necessary prerequisite to make an album like “Of all the Flowers”.
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