About
Measured in calendar years, not to mention the wisdom and insight of a full-grown woman and artist seasoned by experiences ranging from triumph to heartbreak and back again, the Lisa Morales heard on her fourth solo album, Sonora (out Sept. 13, 2024 on Luna Records) is decades removed from the precocious niñita, not yet in grade school, who used to sing mariachi songs with her sister Roberta at Mexican restaurants when they were growing up in Tucson, Arizona. But measure that span between then and now by melody and memory, and the distance shrinks to a heartbeat.
“We sang in Spanish before we sang English,” Morales says of the Mexican music that soundtracked and informed her life “from being a toddler on up” — all the way up, in fact, to the present day. Lisa and Roberta sang that music not just at restaurants at their father’s behest, but at every family gathering (“practically bi-weekly,” she laughs), together with their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins by the dozens. And on the rare occasions when they weren’t singing themselves, they still marinated in the music daily, from the beautiful boleros on the family turntable to endless hours of Sonoran rancheras (“Mexican country music,” as Lisa calls it) on the radio. Of course there was plenty of non-Spanish music in that formative air, too; an older brother had a rock band, and one of those many cousins just happened to be Linda Ronstadt. But the music of her mother’s homeland south of the border always permeated the deepest.
“All of that Mexican music, it’s the fiber of who I am,” says Morales, now a veteran Texas-based singer-songwriter with a storied performance history and a deep catalog spanning rock, country, folk, and Americana. And though a lot of her original music — both from the years she spent building an international following with Roberta as the acclaimed duo Sisters Morales and throughout the solo career she officially launched in 2011 — has been in English, Lisa has long maintained that “everything just comes from a deeper place when I’m singing in Spanish.” Fans of Sisters Morales seemed to concur, with 2002’s all-Spanish Para Gloria being one of the duo’s most popular albums. But it wasn’t until her second solo album, 2018’s Luna Negra and the Daughter of the Sun, that the muse first moved her to explore the untapped wellspring of a third tongue she’d been fluent in her entire life, but had never consciously incorporated into her songwriting: Spanglish.
“It was completely unconscious at the time; all these phrases in English were coming out as if they were written in Spanish because of the order of the words,” she recalls. “But that’s when I thought, ‘Oh, I’m stumbling onto something here, when I’m writing in Spanish and English together.’ And it just became a part of me that I didn’t acknowledge before.”
Marrying different genres — Mexican and American, traditional and contemporary — had long been part of her wheelhouse, especially in Sisters Morales. On Luna Negra, 2022’s She Ought to Be King and now Sonora, her vibrant melange of musical flavors and different languages (even if not always within the same song) is artful enough to distinguish Morales’ embrace of “Spanglish” not just as part of the mix but as practically a genre unto itself.
