Though she’s expressed admiration for Regional Mexican music over the years and has collaborated with legacy artists in the scene like Tigres Del Norte, Tucanes de Tijuana, and, most recently, Bronco, no one thinks of Julieta Venegas as an artist in that category. However, her new album Norteña (May 22) incorporates elements of these styles of music into her own particular sound. In turn, this collection explores her reconnection to the land where she grew up—Tijuana, right on the U.S. border—while making sense of our current times in a direct yet poetic way.
After living in Buenos Aires for 8 years, Venegas found herself homesick, and Norteña was born of that ennui. “I started realizing that something was hurting me, emotionally speaking,” she tells Remezcla. “It wasn’t like I yearned to go back to Mexico, [but] I always felt like a foreigner. And in the back of my mind, I knew I would come back, but I didn’t know when or how I would do it,” she explains. Around the same time, her twin sister Yvonne was in the middle of a photography project based around Baja California, their home state. Julieta connected immediately. “I began picturing it in my head, and it began manifesting in a musical memory. [It was] like going to my happy place where I found shelter,” she says.
This time around, Venegas’ writing process was slow. She likens it to studying the songs before going to the studio to capture them. In turn, a strong visual and aesthetic identity began to form for the project. “Everything has happened very naturally,” she says. “There are some songs that I spent a lot of time singing at home to myself and to my friends when they would come over. I think that was beautiful. Now I feel like I can finally let them go. In a way, it’s the ending of a phase and the beginning of a new one.” Her inspiration extended beyond music, and at the same time, she wrote a novel titled “Norteña: Memorias Del Comienzo,” a work of fiction that explores the life of a woman trying to find herself in Tijuana.
Although many may interpret the title as an alignment with the music genre, Venegas makes it clear that Norteña refers to herself. She’s quick to point out that, while music from this latitude served as a prime inspiration, it’s not her attempt at making a true regional mexicano album. She does, however, joke that she heard someone call it her “Juli Tumbada” album. On Norteña, there are traces of every aspect of her career—her signature accordion makes several appearances, and her simple yet elegant hooks that made her a household name in 2000s Latine pop make every song feel like a potential hit. Beyond that, there are several stylistic and aesthetic elements from música mexicana in Norteña, everything from tubas to corrido verses and vocal melodies that refer to genres in the style, filtered through her unique vision.
“I wanted to make my own version of this type of music,” she asserts. “Because my love of music comes from my mom, my dad, and my aunts. I asked myself why I have dedicated myself to music and what my relationship with music is, and I wanted to focus on the music I grew up listening to at home. I wanted to reflect happiness and warmth through music. And my point of reference was norteño music. I wanted to make a record I could put on at a carne asada with my family. Of course, this is my mom’s favorite album of mine.”
There are songs in Norteña that might seem prescient to our times, especially those that touch on migration, mobilization, and estrangement, like “La Línea,” “Esquina Del Mar,” and “Amigas.” Venegas specifies that the characters and motivations in these lyrics are endemic to Tijuana, a border town with a long and sometimes tragic history. “The migrant drama in Tijuana has always existed,” she notes. “I grew up seeing it unfold. I wrote ‘La Línea’ two years ago, but things have gotten worse since then. It’s not new, but now it has a new layer of cruelty to it that we haven’t seen before.”
There are people who think that all art is political, and in the case of Venegas, she’s been able to write intimately about nostalgia and our current times while also reflecting on stories we hear on the news. Norteña is the ultimate political response to trying times with warmth and conviction while also remaining a very personal statement from one of the most unique songwriters in the Mexican canon.
Norteña is out now.