Natalia Lafourcade Reimagines Mexican Folk Music
After the incident, she needed reconstructive surgery, and had brain inflammation so severe that when she tried to look up, all she saw was black. Even once she was well enough to leave the hospital, she had trouble walking more than a few steps. Lafourcade had been a talkative, impetuous child, but, in the months after the injury, she was laconic and subdued. Doctors told Silva Contreras that her daughter might never be the same. “They said I might not make it in school, I might not make it in a career,” Lafourcade said.
“I told them ‘No,’ ” Silva Contreras said, looking at me intensely over the table at dinner after the son jarocho show. “ ‘I’m going to bring her back.’ ” Silva Contreras told me that she knew her daughter had a rare musical ability (when Lafourcade was just nine months old, her mother had overhead her harmonizing with the tones of their vacuum cleaner). Now Silva Contreras tried to use music to help Lafourcade regain her development. “The first problem was one of willpower,” Silva Contreras said. “I needed observation, imitation, curiosity.” Inspired by Montessori-style education, Silva Contreras followed where Lafourcade’s interest led. If one day she wanted to dance, they danced; if another day she wanted to sing songs, they sang songs. Silva Contreras is convinced that this winding path brought Lafourcade back to herself.
Picking around a kale salad, Lafourcade said that the mark this experience left on her—besides a thin scar, shaped like a horseshoe, between her eyebrows—was a belief in her own intuition. In those early years, following her predilections was how she regained motor skills and relearned how to speak. After two months of healing, she went back to school, where music remained her obsession. Around the time she turned ten, Lafourcade and Silva Contreras moved to Mexico City, and she became preoccupied with the idea of becoming a singer. Silva Contreras didn’t take this seriously at first. But she helped Lafourcade make a recording studio in their bathroom, with a keyboard and an eight-track set. One day, Silva Contreras got an unexpected call from the Mexican media conglomerate TV Azteca; Lafourcade had called the company seeking a role, and now it was offering her a tryout for a musical program. Silva Contreras decided to let her audition, thinking it could be an educational experience. “There were a hundred girls there. They all looked like Barbies,” Silva Contreras remembered. Surprising her mother, Lafourcade was a success, and, at just fourteen, she joined a teen pop trio called Twist, performing on a TV show of the same name.
At dinner, Lafourcade talked about these years without a hint of pleasure in her voice. “I was too young,” she said. The other members of Twist teased her when they saw an embroidered bag her mother had made her. They said that she was “too hippie,” and that she was going to get kicked out. Across the table from me, Lafourcade smiled with sharp satisfaction. “But the opposite happened,” she said. After less than a year, the TV station disbanded Twist, but the group’s manager began working to build a new act around Lafourcade. At one point, the station brought in new potential bandmates for her. “They were these delicious girls. They were teen-agers but they looked like adults. They looked like the Spice Girls,” Lafourcade said. “They’re too tall—I’ll look ridiculous,” she told her manager. “You’ll grow,” he said, shrugging. (At forty-one, she still hasn’t reached five feet.) She began recruiting friends from her school, a music academy called Fermatta with a campus in Mexico City. By this time, she understood that her voice was only one part of why the industry liked her, or other female artists. “I picked friends I thought were very pretty,” she said. “But I learned they weren’t ‘TV pretty.’ ”
Ximena Sariñana, who today is a famous Mexican singer and actress, was a year below Lafourcade at Fermatta. Sariñana recalls Lafourcade as “the absolute popular girl.” “I would be in the cafeteria with my nerdy musician friends who only listened to grunge and Pearl Jam, and suddenly Natalia would go into the cafeteria surrounded by a bunch of girlfriends,” Sariñana said. “She’d be making a lot of noise—she was so fashionable, loud, and always, always very herself, very comfortable in her own skin.” One day, Sariñana was doing her homework with her headphones on when Lafourcade came up and tapped her on the shoulder. In a friendly tone, Lafourcade told Sariñana that she had heard Sariñana was a good singer. Lafourcade got more serious: “But are you a really good singer?” she asked. Lafourcade was still writing and recording her own songs, and she needed backup. “When we spent time together at the piano, and I understood what she wanted to do, I was, like, O.K., I understand why she would need really good singers,” Sariñana said. Within a few semesters, Lafourcade had dropped out of school: she had a record contract with Sony.
