Carrie Rodriguez finds her multilingual voice on ‘Lola’
Carrie Rodriguez’s new album begins with Bill Frisell playing a ’60ssounding guitar lick, and then Rodriguez sings, “No one knows the pain I suffer.” The songs on Rodriguez’s album sidestep abstraction and elusiveness, except for the fact that she sings those words in Spanish, which infuses them with an emotional gravity. “Nadie comprende lo que sufro yo.
Fifteen years into her recording career, Rodriguez has charted a path that, on the surface, seems circuitous. But really what she’s done is made musical excursions in different directions from her Austin roots.
To date, “Lola” is the furthest she’s delved into singing songs written in Spanish.
“That was a daunting aspect of the album,” Rodriguez says. “At first I thought I might make it an all-Spanish record. It’s something I’ve dabbled in for years. For a while I’d do an encore or two at concerts in Spanish. It brought out a different part of”me and my voice. It’s a different emotional palette.”
The pull came from Rodriguez’s desire to honor her great-aunt Eva Garza, a popular big-band and cabaret singer in the ’40s and ’50s, who recorded for Columbia Records.
“Lola” isn’t a tribute album of Garza songs as much as it is a Rodriguez album with Garza’s spirit walking in and out of the room. It showcases songs like the opening “Perfidia,” written by Alberto Dominguez, and other composers, many from Mexico, who wrote standards that didn’t receive the same attention as American big-band writers. Rodriguez also wrote songs that fit comfortably with the decadesold tunes, songs that slide effortlessly between English and Spanish.
“I moved in this direction because I couldn’t imagine doing a show entirely in Spanish,” Rodriguez says. “It wouldn’t feel natural singing Span- ish songs to a crowd that only understands English in the same way it would feel unnatural singing only in English to a crowd that only understood Spanish. So I started writing songs that bubbled up from research through my family’s history and current ideas about what it means to be a MexicanAmerican. I think it ended up coherent, even though it’s in two languages. It’s true to who I am and how I grew up.”
Rodriguez grew up surrounded by art, which knows no single language. Her father is David Rodriguez, a beloved and acclaimed singer-songwriter from Houston who died last year. Her mother is painter Katy Nail, the daughter of writer Frances Nail, who had deep roots in Houston’s arts community. Rodriguez’s path initially steered toward conservatory and classical music, though as a teen she toured with her father and played a few times with Lyle Lovett. Those experiences prompted Rodriguez to ditch conservatory at Oberlin College and switch gears from violinist to fiddler at the Berklee College of Music.
“She always seemed to have a strong sense of direction,” Lovett says. “She seemed to have a good sense of what she was about.”
Still, she took tentative steps toward becoming a recording artist. Rodriguez toured with songwriter Chip Taylor (he wrote “Wild Thing” and “Angel of the Morn- ing”), who urged her to step from the back of the stage to a microphone and start singing. They made a handful of wonderful duet albums that were initially heavy on Taylor compositions, but he also mentored and nurtured her own writing.
So in the past 15 years, Rodriguez made four albums with Taylor and four of her own, all of it leading up to “Lola.”
Rodriguez says there was some Spanish in the house growing up, but not much. Her father grew up “as part of a generation that got in trouble for speaking Spanish in public school.”
But reaching back across another generation, she found not just another language but another world of music.
“I didn’t know anything about this greataunt who was a famous singing star in South America and Mexico,” she says of Garza, who died at 49 in 1966. “I don’t remember if it was my grandmother or sister, but one of them mailed me a stack of CDs burned from old vinyl, and I was in shock hearing this tremendous voice coming out of the record player — with a full orchestra, strings and horns.”
Garza became a starting point for discovering a world of music from a time and place that resonated greatly during that time and in that place. Those recordings found a listenership in and around Texas at the time, but they didn’t receive the same sort of U.S. distribution that Englishlanguage big-band music did.
Much has changed since Garza died a half century ago. Rodriguez and Luke Jacobs — a musical and life partner — recently had their first child. “Lola” isn’t the baby album, a common phenomenon in which a songwriter reflects on adjusting to a new stage in life. But she was pregnant during recording and recalls the dance-ready music prompting her to move during recording sessions.
So “Lola” and child arrived in the world not too far apart, into a multilingual present where cultural heritage is embraced rather than forgotten.