Lisa Morales Details Upcoming Album 'Sonora'

The Lisa Morales you hear on her fourth solo album, Sonora (out September 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,” a tribute to her longtime musical partner and sibling, Roberta, is out now. “I started writing this song three days before my sister, Roberta, passed," recalls Morales.  "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, AZ, 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 soundtracked and informed her life “from being a toddler on up” — up, in fact, to the present day.

Lisa and Roberta sang 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 concur, 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’s Luna Negra and the Daughter 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’s Ain’t No Perfect Diamond. 

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

On Sonora, 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: “Puedes escucharme, Hermana? / Can you hear me, Roberta?” As devastating as that endnote may be, though, it’s an anomaly on Sonora. 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 on Sonora that Morales wrote solo. 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 A.J. 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. Closest of all to 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 on Sonora. 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 vets 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 una tradición familiar. Sonora will be released on September 13, 2024 via Luna Records.

LISA MORALES TOUR DATES: Aug. 24      McGonigal's Mucky Duck         Houston, TX Sept. 6-7    Antlers & Acorns Festival       Boone, NC Sept. 13      Waterloo Records In-store     Austin, TX Sept. 14      04 Center                               Austin, TX Sept. 20      The Blue Door                        Oklahoma City, OK Oct. 4         Old Quarter Acoustic Cafe     Galveston, TX

SONORA Tracklisting

1. Flores (En Un Jardin)
2. It's A Common Thing
3. En El Limbo
4. What Do You Want
5. Imposter
6. Hermanitas in the Rain
7. Adios Mi Vida
8. Have it All
9. La Paz
10. Hermana

Photo credit: Gabriella Howard

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