BWW Music Review: With SHE USED TO BE MINE Florencia Cuenca Makes A Classic Her Own

My freshman year of college, my drama teacher Stacy Schronk had the class lie down on the stage in dim light and close our eyes. He went to the High-Fi by the Stage Manager's station and he played side one of the record album Somewhere In Time by John Barry. As we lay there, his gentle voice spoke to us, guided us, instructing us to note that which we felt but also the images we saw in our minds. We were instructed to observe colors, visions, anything at all that was absorbed and released through our hearts and our heads. In the discussion that followed the exercise, many spoke of sadness experienced. I didn't. I had seen the movie Somewhere In Time - it remains a favorite to this day - although there is sadness in the film, that sadness need not translate to the music from the movie. My emotional journey on that stage was one filled with joy, wonder, hope, visions of sunshine, clear skies, and the color orange.

Music is a personal part of everybody's life, particularly those tradespeople who hear things differently than the rest of us that just listen to songs we like, then go on to the next one. There will be times when a singer finds something different in a composition, something unlike anything discovered by any person who visited the song before them. Florencia Cuenca has found something different in a song first sung on the Broadway stage in 2015 that went from zero to a hundred on the Legend Scale, immediately.

As her Mariachi-arranged recording of Hamilton's "Burn" proved, Ms. Cuenca is a Mistress of Reinvention, and with her new recording of "She Used To Be Mine" Florencia takes her knack for deconstructing a song and putting it back together to a new level. This power ballad that has brought so many (performers and listeners) to tears finds a different life, message, and meaning through her storytelling skills. Aided by her musical director husband Jaime Lozano, who has arranged the song in a way that melds Mariachi with Son Jarocho, Cuenca has painted a picture of verve and valor, of reclamation and redemption. For Waitress's Jenna, this song occurs at a moment of despair and defeat, and although Florencia's changes to the lyrics are limited to the fusion of Spanish with English, the tale being told is not different: only the outlook is. Feel the optimism as the woman in the story sings about the child to whom she will give birth, observe the determination as she declares that she "learns how to toughen up" and believe that, when she sings of the girl she once was, the prize upon which her eyes gaze is the day when the woman and the girl will be one again, if only to provide a proper role model for her child. This is Florencia Cuenca's story, one of determination, not despair. It's intriguing and provocative.

The single, just released, is planned for an album titled BROADWAY EN SPANGLISH upon which Ms. Cuenca and Mr. Lozano will be presenting Broadway songs with Latin American music arrangements, the English lyrics being infused with some Spanish language. With the success of the "Burn" recording and the potential available through this new "She Used To Be Mine", the happy couple celebrates more than Broadway and their birth culture, they celebrate a new day in America when Latin artists will shine more than ever before, a new time in our country when Mexican-born people and artists feel more love and visibility than they have in recent times. This writer plans to be one of the first to get their hands on the CD when it is released.

Now a warning. You're going to be shocked at first, the same way my generation was when Liza Minnelli had the audacity to turn the torch song "Losing My Mind" into a dance remix (CAN you IMAGINE!) but don't turn away. Don't stop listening. Open your mind to change, and your heart to Florencia. Let the track play through to the end. Listen to it more than once. Give yourself permission to go on a different journey. You might learn that you prefer all the beautiful angst provided by earlier performances of the new classic. Or you could discover something wonderful and new.

And new is never a bad idea.

Florencia Cuenca SHE USED TO BE MINE is a new release on the Jaime Lozano label. It is available on all digital platforms.

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