WORLD TRAVELS HELP SINGER FIND HER MOJO

Romina Von Mohr has that unquestionable look of someone who should be famous.

And it’s not just her photogenic features or eyes that seem to beam outward like backlit windows to an enchanted soul. Once you get past her looks, it’s Von Mohr’s voice that confirms the point, a soothing sound that can flutter into higher registers. Plus, she has a star’s backstory. Von Mohr is a former model who comes from humble beginnings. She later joined a band out of high school and traveled to Europe, where she crammed into a London apartment to live out her music dreams.

But before Von Mohr became a familiar face to Houston audiences, she was listening to the Beatles and Elton John and singing and writing music in Spanish as she bounced around different areas of Mexico as a child — staying with family in Mexico City, Irapuato, Monterrey and Cancun.

At 13, Von Mohr came to the U.S. with just two suitcases, a lot of hope and her love of singing and music.

“I started taking it seriously when I was in eighth grade,” she said about her time growing up around Friendswood and attending Brookside Intermediate School, where she played volleyball and sang in the choir.

When you hear Von Mohr sing, perhaps at her Friday gig in 8th Wonder Brewery, there’s a dreamy quality to her voice. It’s not quite a folk styling, not quite rock. Her influences, though, are clearly Mexican singers such as Lila Downs, Natalia Lafourcade and her favorite, Julieta Venegas. Venegas’ 2003 album “Sí” is the first music she bought with her own money.

“There’s very few albums I can listen to from beginning to end without skipping a song. It’s one of those albums for me,” she says of “Si.”

Like Venegas, Von Mohr plays the guitar, but it was something she started after joining the Houston band Crashing Colors.

“We played a lot around Houston, we released our EP, and we moved to London together right as I left high school. And I went to school there for a year,” she says.

But the move didn’t result in realizing any rock star dreams. After about a year, Von Mohr and her bandmates returned home. Shortly after that, the group broke up.

“We all had different visions of what we wanted to do with our music, but it was a very healthy experience for me overall, like playing around town with the band. And it also gave me all the connections to start my own solo playing career,” she says.

One of those connections is Mark Austin, promoter and manager of groups including The Suffers. “He’s like a mentor for me,” she says.

Austin encouraged her to take down a lot of the music she had floating around the internet. The idea was to develop the best music and release it properly. Von Mohr says she should have an album of her latest songs ready before the end of next year.

Von Mohr is excited about what’s next. After getting her musical mojo right at a songwriting retreat in a California forest, she’s on a new quest to write the very best song she can, and her biggest project yet is pushing her in that direction. Von Mohr has been taking trips to Los Angeles to craft pop songs with DJ Paul Paredes, who’s originally from Dallas.

For Von Mohr, creating music is for the sake of her art, and she’s in no rush to “make it,” she says. “Honestly, with life happening and just running into being an adult and a lot of things with relationships that helped me grow up and understand life, I’ve just realized that that’s really not my goal. I’m so in love with making music.”