Measured in calendar years, not to mention the wisdom and insight of a full-grown woman and artist seasoned by well-over 10,000 hours of 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 even 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. Little Lisa and Roberta sang that music not just at restaurants at the behest of their father, but at every family gathering (“practically bi-weekly,” she laughs), together with their parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles and literally 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 ranchera (“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 it was the music of her mother’s homeland south of the border that always permeated the deepest.
“All of that Mexican music, it’s the fiber of who I am,” says Morales, now a veteran Austin, 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 really 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 something that was a part of me that I didn’t acknowledge before.”
Marrying different genres — Mexican and American, traditional and contemporary — had of course long been part of her wheelhouse, especially in Sisters Morales. But 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 onto itself.
“You want to have a style, and I really feel like this is my thing now — it just flows naturally from me,” she says — even though she can’t help but laugh at the thought of how her late mother, Gloria, a Mexican literature professor and linguist who spoke 11 languages, would tsk-tsk anytime anyone in the family mixed-and-matched Spanish and English. “When we were little and my grandparents would speak half Spanish and half English, she would say, ‘Ay, Mama, no! All in English or all in Spanish!’ But she loved art, so I know she would have appreciated
this as art because she always encouraged us in everything we did. She was a force and she was joy, all the time.”
And so too was Roberta, Lisa’s beloved sister and all-time favorite bandmate and harmony singer since childhood. Roberta died of cancer in August of 2021 — nearly 25 years after winning an earlier fight with cancer during the recording of Sister Morales’ second album, 1997’s Ain’t No Perfect Diamond. At the time of Roberta’s passing, Lisa’s 2022 record She Ought to Be King had already been “in the can” for several months — making Sonora her first full-album project written and recorded in a world without her best friend just a phone call away. Still, even though there was no way Roberta’s memory was not going to profoundly influence her every step of the way, Lisa insists that Sonora was decidedly not conceived as a grieving album. At least not in the same way as Beautiful Mistake, her gut-wrenching 2011 solo debut made in the wake of Gloria’s death in 2009 and in the midst of an impending divorce.
“With Beautiful Mistake, I wrote the entire album by myself, usually at 1 or 3 o’clock in the morning, when my then babies were asleep,” she recalls. “The songs all came out unconsciously, like an eruption. It was a total purge, which I needed. But with this one — I was trying so hard not to have another album all about grief, because sometimes it seems like everything I write is grieving, like my whole life has been grieving things. So I really didn’t want this to be a grieving album — even though some of it is.”
On Sonora, the brunt of that grieving doesn’t come until the very end, with “Hermana” — a song first released in the spring of 2022 on El Amor No Es Cobarde, a teaser EP for the She Ought to Be King album issued later that year. Morales wrote the mournful balada right after her sister’s death, too late for it to be added to the full-length without seeming like an afterthought, but also too timely and important to her not to share immediately. But two years on, the heart-shattering anguish in Lisa’s voice as she sing-cries the last two lines rings even more poignant: “Puedes escucharme, Hermana? / Can you hear me, Roberta?”
As devastating as that endnote may be, though, it’s something of an anomaly on Sonora. True to Morales’ determination not to surrender fully sorrow, the grief of “Hermana” is beautifully counterbalanced earlier on the album by “Hermanitas in the Rain,” a lilting, almost rhapsodic snapshot of a cherished memory from her and Roberta’s childhood. “I started it a few days before Roberta died, and even tried to have her write it with me,” says Lisa. “A few months after she died, I sent the lyrics to David Hidalgo and asked him to help me with it. He said he could help with arranging if I needed, but thought I needed to write this one on my own. He was right.”
“Hermanitas in the Rain,” “Hermana,” and “What Do You Want” (plucked from Lisa’s “way back” files) are in fact the only three songs on Sonora that Morales wrote solo. The rest were all co-writes — an approach she admits can be harder for her than writing alone, but often as not worth the challenge (as notably proven with “Flyin’ and Cryin’,” a co-write and duet with Americana great Rodney Crowell that graced her last album.) Her co-writers this time around include “Flores (En Un Jardin)” (with Tish Hinojosa); “Have It All” (with JoJo Garza of Los Lonely Boys); “Impostor” (with Kelsey Wilson of Austin’s Sir Woman); “La Paz” (with A.J. Haynes of Louisiana’s the Seratones); “Adios Mi Vida” (with Mariangela Guerra); and “En El Limbo” (with Nick Diaz — aka Buenos Diaz — and Felipe Castañeda). Closest of all to her heart, though, is “It’s a Common Thing” — a song she did get to co-write with Roberta, by honoring one of her sister’s last wishes.
“Before she passed away, Roberta asked me to please do something with her music, and she left me a ton of voice memos with songs she had been working on. One of them she had
started was ‘It’s a Common Thing.’ She sang the melody on the voice memo but the only words she really had were the title phrase, so I finished it. But that song is only the beginning of the process. She left a lot for me to work with — albums and albums worth!”
Roberta herself can be heard on “It’s a Common Thing,” via the brief snippet of her original voice memo that opens the track. But she’s not the only blood relative of Lisa’s featured on Sonora. Thomas Spencer, Lisa’s 19-year-old son and latest full-time addition to her road band, makes his studio debut, playing lead or classical guitar on several tracks (alongside such esteemed industry vets as JoJo Garza, David Pulkingham, Davíd Garza, and Michael Ramos). And much to his proud mother’s delight, he sings a fair amount of background vocals, too.
“I really missed the effortless family harmonies that Roberta and I always had together, so I asked him one day to try singing with me, and bam, there it was — that same unmistakable family quality.”
Just call it una tradición familiar.
