Not afraid of Laestrygons and Cyclops, Natalia Lafourcade wanted the journey to be long. The result of that expedition to the very bottom is her latest album, which was released at the end of last year. of all flowers. It has been through hurricanes, floods and earthquakes. He was shipwrecked at sea. She survived and swam away. He climbed volcanoes, in full eruption. He descended into the underworld. She knew that she was defeated, dissolved and broken, but she received the help of Maria Sabina, a former healer from deep Mexico who, like Virgil, knew how to guide her. Perhaps on this journey, which he undertook without a rudder and in delirium, he realized that he could learn from flowers. To be a fate that weathers the storms. Be fragile against the storm. It grows thanks to the same rain that ravages the world. Swim through the holy tears.

There are at least two dimensions of flowers. External and irreparable, which, like a hot climate, has the power to destroy. And the inner one, in which you can return to your roots and be born again, bear fruit, be a new seed. Maybe the first dimension is the world. Maybe it’s another language. Lafourcade endured both. After almost seven years of researching the folklore aspect of Latin American music and its strong memory, he launches a set of twelve unpublished songs, created as a result of all kinds of transformations, from imprisonment and pandemic or returning to Veracruz, to managing to find, as in the origin of everything, his own voice, the truest , the most airy.

Aware, as never before, that she came into this world alone (and that she will leave here alone, as human conditions dictate), she knows that company and nostalgia are valued, part of life and learning. They are a home and a humble lesson. Clean water that bathes us. And the alchemy of music, in his case, turns not only the pain of broken relationships and lost years into light, but into a necessary and indispensable experience, on a section that is part of a larger route, which has no shortcuts. The hero’s or heroine’s journey goes through pain, heartbreak, boleros, bossa nova, are Cuban, samba and perhaps, the melancholic courage of the yaraví, because death is what gives meaning to life: “After the death of my war, I am reborn grateful.” There is patience, not only for composing, but for the restoration of voice and body, spirit and mind. The power of the word bifurcates in the conscious recreation of the last breath. Before words there is music that survives, that refuses to die, sounds that have barely survived entropy and celebration. There is a release of wind.

Natalia Lafourcade realized that, at the end of the day, she was the only one who could tell her how to breathe. His own voice. She is their warmth, and as a songwriter and singer she can be warmth to everyone and not die out. The key was an album that is an intimate diary and ritual. As with his literary namesake Natalia García Freire, Lafourcade’s aesthetic quest finds its origin in the ancient wisdom of plants, in their creative power. Because every woman and every man should be their own healer, their own right place, their own redemption and their own aroma of jasmine. With Lafourcade is the grace of feminine energy, the creator of worlds, which is deeply spiritual, strong in the vulnerable, able to discern what is important: no longer trophies, but the safety of wounds and cures. Art has meaning to the extent that it connects us to what is loved.

For this album, the musical or sexual genre is not important, the warmth of the embrace is important. There is a way to love, liberating, conscious and deep. Produced by Adán Jodorowsky, this project spreads through the music world in Spanish like a prayer to nature, a hummingbird rushing into a storm. With these songs, the composer also expresses her wish for the people she loves to be well and fly freely, without fear of parting: “have a nice day, Nicolás, don’t be afraid to cross the door.” Something like love, like memory, like separation, like relief. Like the certainty that existence is an imperfect process and that we cannot give up either the good or the bad, but it is a journey in which there is always an arrival, a reunion, a return. And maybe that’s how, in the break of the waves, Natalia Lafourcade discovered the meaning of Ithaca. (OR)