The bright major chords of joyous household gatherings, the somber soundtrack of difficult family times—these are what led Julieta Venegas to pursue music as a means of self-expression. The singer-songwriter did so first within her loving family, and eventually to adoring audiences around the world. With a new album and memoir—both titled Norteña—the Tijuana-raised Venegas depicts the foundation of her musical trajectory.
Born in California as one of identical twins, Venegas moved with her family to Mexico when she was just one month old. She began classical piano lessons on the family piano at age eight, but later joined rock and ska bands in Tijuana as a teenager. Venegas relocated to Mexico City to pursue a career as a singer-songwriter and, after several years, signed a major-label contract and hit it big with her debut album, Aquí, in 1997. She distinguished herself as a soloist playing heartfelt alt-rock, sometimes adding regional flavors, most notably when she put down her guitar and strapped on her Gabbinelli piano accordion.
Julieta Venegas blazed a path for Latin female singer-songwriters and created songs that were lovingly written into the hearts of fans around the world. She has won one Grammy, eight Latin Grammys, and five MTV Awards; her second album, Bueninvento, ranked third on Rolling Stone‘s 2012 list of the greatest Latin Rock records.
For her new album, Venegas said she originally wanted to make a traditional album of music from northern Mexico, but changed course. “I realized that I wasn’t going to be able to make a traditional Norteño album,” she notes when speaking to PopMatters. “I wanted to sort of celebrate Norteño music and my experience growing up in Tijuana, but also at the same time I wanted it to be more like my own personal view of it.”
“I didn’t want it to be like a super-artsy vision of how I express my Norteño roots”, she added. “I wanted it to be something my mom would enjoy and my family would enjoy. The spirit that really goes through the album is how we listen to music in my family, which is just a joy-filled sort of way.”
That familial connection is most evident in the closing track, “Te Celebramos (We Celebrate You)”, a bouncing party song for her photographer father that is brimming with brass, woodwinds and a large chorus. In it, she sings: “Today I want to talk about a man / A man I know / Whose birthday it is today, and I want to honor him / With a ready smile, his camera in hand / With his dreams intact, a true believer in love.”
Though she lived in the United States for only a short time, Julieta Venegas experienced life along the border as redolent of the cultural mix and clash between the two countries.
In the new album’s first single, “La Linea (The Line)”, Julieta Venegas tells the story of a couple who are separated by the US-Mexico border. She noted that she wrote the song before tensions rose precipitously at the border and wanted to tell the emotional aspect of the story as opposed to a political one.
While the song moves along with a gentle, bouncy ambiance, the narrator tells a story of yearning for her distant love. “I hold a sad memory / Of when I was torn away from you / When we realized, all too suddenly / That reality wouldn’t be easy / I’ll keep singing…”
In a sense, the Norteña album began when Julieta Venegas moved to Buenos Aires in 2017. Though she made close friends and found it an enriching experience over eight years, she eventually began to miss Mexico. She began composing songs that would eventually become her new album. Still, she also tentatively wrote prose pieces about her years in Tijuana, specifically how they led to her career in music.
“When I started recording the album, I realized that I was doing a sort of memoir in a way, musically”, she notes. “I had thought of this idea of doing a memoir for a long time, because I really like personal essays, and I like memoirs in general.
“I always called it a text,” she continues. “I never called it a book, because I wasn’t sure if I was actually going to finish it. For two years, I read mostly about Baja California and its history, and many novels written from Tijuana. So it was actually really an experience of being immersed in the whole thing. Now I realize it was all just I was missing being in Mexico, being closer to my family.”
Over the years, Julieta Venegas often cited her early piano lessons as the beginning of her musical journey. Now, she realized, “It was before that, it was my family—the way they listen to music, the way we listen to music at home, the way we relate to music. I think that is definitely very much connected to finding that music is my way that I express myself.”
Writing the memoir, she said, has “been very healing for me. Because I felt like I was contradicting what my parents wanted me to be, which was like somebody who got married and lived in Tijuana forever. Even though I built my career and everything, and my relationship with my family has changed, I felt like that was something that was always there for me. I don’t think it was there for them, but for me it was like I didn’t do what they expected from me, which is something that does weigh on me. This whole project was a way of releasing that tension in me, which was very important. My process with music was always very solitary, and so it was great to be able to write it and share it with them.”
Venegas said this latest work was different in that it was “slow cooked”, coming together as she thought through this new kind of memory project.
“I feel like now that I’ve done it, I always want to do it like this, you know?” she notes. “I always wanted to work on a project that goes in different directions, and it was very enriching for me to learn from that. It took me three years to do it, so I was like, ‘Maybe this is the way I want to do things now’. Take my time, do it slowly.”
“I’ve always been very anxious when I’m working”, she admits. “I wanted to be done, I wanted to do the song, and then record it, and just put it out, and now it’s like taking my time was actually very important for me. It was wonderful, actually. I felt like, ‘What’s the hurry?’ you know? You have to take your time to do things; to give them the weight that I think they deserve.”
