Lisa Morales Shapes New Album, ‘Sonora’, with Influences of Ballads, Boleros, Rancheras, and Corridos of Her Youth (2024)

San Antonio, TX — The Lisa Morales you hear on her fourth solo album,Sonora(out Sept. 13, 2024, on Luna Records) is decades removed from the precocious niñita who was not yet 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.

The first single/video “Hermanitas in the Rain” is a tribute to her longtime musical partner and sibling, Roberta. Morales recalls, “I started writing this song three days before my sister, Roberta, passed. I went into her room to have her help me with it but it was hard. I had all these beautiful memories flooding back to me in that moment. I wrote it all in a matter of minutes but didn’t realize it was done, music and all, until I brought it back out a year and a half later. When we were little girls in Tucson, Arizona, the monsoon rains in July and August would fill the busy streets around the block. Roberta would grab me, and we would sit on the curb to get splashed by the cars driving by! I put in pieces of our culture in this song, lyrically. Mom crawled to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City to be able to have us—in the song I refer to “Guadalupe.-she watches over.”

“We sang in Spanish before we sang English,” Morales says of the Mexican music that sound-tracked and informed her life “from being a toddler on up” — up, in fact, to the present day. Lisa and Roberta sing that music not just at restaurants at their father’s behest, but at every family gathering (“practically bi-weekly,” she laughs), together with their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and 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 rancheras (“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 her many cousins ​​just happened to be Linda Ronstadt.

“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 compete, with 2002’s all-Spanish Para Gloria being one of the duo’s most popular albums. But it wasn’t until her second solo album, 2018’sLuna Negraand theDaughter 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.

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’sAin’t No PerfectDiamond.

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 — makingSonoraher first full-album project written and recorded in a world without her best friend just a phone call away. Although Roberta’s memory of her would profoundly influence her every step of the way, Lisa insisted thatSonorawas decidedly not conceived as a grieving album. “The songs all came out unconsciously, like an eruption. “It was a total purge, which I needed.”

OnSonora, the brunt of that grieving doesn’t come until the very end, with “Hermana” — Morales wrote the mournful ballada shortly after her sister’s death. Two years on, the heart-shattering anguish in Lisa’s voice as she sing-cries the last two lines rings even more poignant: “Can you hear me, Sister? / Can you hear me, Roberta?”

As devastating as that endnote may be, though, it’s an anomaly onSonora. True to Morales’ determination not to surrender fully to 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.

“Hermanitas in the Rain,” “Hermana,” and “What Do You Want” are the only three songs onSonora that Morales wrote alone. The rest were all co-writes — (“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 AJ 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). her heart is “It’s a Common Thing” — a song she got to co-write with Roberta, honoring one of her sister’s last wishes.

Roberta 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 onSonora. 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 veterans 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 a family tradition.

Sonorawill be released on September 13, 2024, via Luna Records.

Lisa Morales on tour:
Aug 24 Houston, TX McGonigel’s Mucky Duck
Sep 6-7 Boone, NC Antlers & Acorns Festival
Sep 13 Austin, TX Waterloo Records In-store
Sep 14 Austin, TX 04 Center
Sep 20 Oklahoma City, OK The Blue Door
Oct 4 Galveston, TX Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe

For more info visit lisamoralesmusic.com.

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