‘Renaissance’ woman
Latin pop star Carla Morrison making rare visit to Boston
If you’ve seen the Tiny Desk Concert that Latin pop singer Carla Morrison did for NPR, you’ve seen one of the more emotional performances out there. She’s doing one of her typically intense ballads of love and longing — and just when the viewer might break into tears, she goes and does so herself.
She laughs on the phone when that moment is brought up. “That happens to me all the time, and I’ll admit that I’m a highly sensitive person. Not that I feel you always have to go that deep, but my best songs are the ones where I’ve reflected on the things I miss, or I wanted, or that I wish I had in my life. But honestly, I was also tearing up that day because the pandemic had just passed, and I’d spent so much of lockdown watching those concerts and wondering if they would ever be back. But here I was — as a Mexican, as a woman of color, as a woman who’s not super skinny. I always like to think that a young girl in Mexico can see that and think, ‘I can have my dream, because Carla can do it’.”
Morrison is a beloved figure in Latin pop and one of its edgier artists, with a Latin Grammy and worldwide platinum albums. She makes a rare local appearance at Big Night Live on Tuesday behind a new album, El Renacimiento, which brings her closer to a mainstream pop sound.
“It was more a matter of finding who I was,” she said. “My early records were much more acoustic folkie-sounding, but I was always listening to jazz and to people like Dua Lipa, and of course there was always Adele. So I started writing more on the piano and my husband who is my longtime collaborator said, ‘Are you sure you want to go this route? This is pop!’ And I said ‘I know, but I just want to do it’.” So far however she has not recorded in English. “I would love to do that, and I’d also like to sing in French— I just need the right song. I’m a little intimidated because I’m not sure I have the voice. But for sure the desire is there.”
Before the pandemic she’d already put her career on temporary hold, feeling burned out by the exposure, and temporarily moved with her husband to Paris. “I was one of the first artists in Mexico to do social media, so I didn’t know what could happen. I got exhausted and had to put the brakes on, for my own mental health. That allowed me to set boundaries and revisit my motives and my reasons. This career is a very jealous one, because it asks for all of your attention. You have to be 100 percent there.”
Her songs do tend to go deep, whether she’s writing about love or on the new album, her struggles with depression and anxiety. “When I started making music, I thought the songs on the radio weren’t talking about what day to day people go through. I thought that all the songs about love should not be happy songs — We need songs to cry and get drunk to. But nobody was talking about our truth and about our aches. Words to me are like swords — If you’re not careful what you’re saying you can cut into someone’s life, or you can save them. My fans are very intense because they’re always vocal. I can hear them saying ‘Yeah! You understand’.”