Crossing cultures
Jessica Hernandez & The Deltas record dual album in Spanish, English
Anticipation is starting to take over Jessica Hernandez’s life.
The musician is in familiar territory.
She’s released albums before.
But her latest effort is something different.
She and her band, The Deltas, have spent nearly a year recording their first full-length bilingual recording, “Telephone” and “Telefono,” to be released on June 23.
“I’ve always wanted to do an album like this,” she says in a recent phone interview. “But I wasn’t too confident with singing or writing in Spanish.”
Hernandez is a second-generation Cuban-American and Mexican-American, and she felt it her duty to further explore her Hispanic heritage on the band’s new recording.
She knew songs written and recorded in English required more than simply translation — a full rethink was needed to truly give them equivalent poetry and power in her second language.
Hernandez wrote all the songs on “Telephone” in English, then traveled to Mexico City to write the album in Spanish.
“My friends helped me come up with rewrites to all of the songs,” she says. “They kept the same sound I was going for on the album. They aren’t translations of the English versions. The albums sound cohesive but different.”
Hernandez spent two full weeks speaking exclusively in Spanish, oftentimes singing for hours in her friend’s studio to build the muscle memory.
“It was difficult,” she says. “But they were honest with me. When it came to pronunciation, they wanted it to be done correctly. They would stop me and say, ‘I didn’t hear the “r” rolled that time.’ All of it was very constructive to the sound.”
Hernandez says the album is intensely personal and provocative, which she calls proof that the band upped the ante for the second album.
She and the band fused together goth pop, Latin rock, psychedelic surf, punk cabaret, dirty dancehall and balladry.
“The most fun about this project is that I’ve learned more about myself,” she says. “I’ve become comfortable singing and speaking in Spanish. Though my dad still will laugh at me when I begin to speak it. It’s about knowing where I come from. The albums are a taste of that.”