Ely Guerra

1999 - or was it 2000? - was the year of Latin alternative music. It came, caused a brief flare, and then it seemed to sink again, back into the sea of music. A couple of acts made a name, but the rest found themselves lost again. One person who didn't get a chance to ride the wave was Mexican singer-songwriter Ely Guerra. Her third disc, Lotofire, appeared in Mexico in ‘99, a singular record that owed little to Mexico, a lot to Brazil, and even more to the electronic experimentations that were interwoven with her melodies and words by producer Andrés Levin. Lotofire has remained unheard outside Mexico - until now, when Higher Octave has finally released it in the U.S.. The biggest surprise about it, given the rapidly shifting world of electronica, is how contemporary is still sounds, two-and-a-half years after the fact.

"I've been writing since I was 10 years old, so I'm getting all these experiences and trying to put them in my music. I'm very free."

But why's it taken so long to come out?

"EMI wasn't interested in releasing the record in the United States,"Guerra said, "but Higher Octave was very enthusiastic, so this is the time - I guess life is just like that!"

At 30, Guerra has reached full maturity as a writer. She sounds nothing like anyone else, and the music on Lotofire bears little similarity to her last albums.

"My music has been growing, and I've been growing too," she explained. "I've been writing since I was 10 years old, so I'm getting all these experiences and trying to put them in my music. I'm very free, and trying to get my influence from different things - I love to cook and I love to eat, and I think those are my influences! I get in touch with different things, and I feel I have to do what I feel at the moment I'm in the studio. Also, the lyrics are different on every record. I try to say the things I'm perceiving. My music is totally a part of me; I'm the same person on and off stage, it's very natural, and that's why my albums are different, I need to say different things in different ways."

Part of her growth as a teenager involved heading north to Olympia, Washington, to study English at Evergreen College. Surprisingly, however, during her stay there Guerra never became involved with the college town's burgeoning independent music.

"I was 17, I didn't speak any English and I wanted to learn the language." she recalls. "So one day I told my parents I wanted to go there. I knew it was an artistic university, and I wanted to be there in a language school. Most of the time I was playing and singing in Spanish. I busked in Seattle in Portland, and played some places in Olympia, including local radio and television. But I wasn't involved with the local musicians. It was just a little part of my life; I enjoyed living in the woods."

For Lotofire she worked with producer Andrés Levin, whose credits include Marisa Monte and Moreno Veloso, a man with adventurous tastes and good ears, who "contributed a lot. It's a record we did together. Every time I work with my songs, I'm looking for people to make me grow. He's very charismatic. But I believe a lot of the electronic things on the record came from Arto Lindsay. He was listening a lot, and gave us a lot of support. I felt very comfortable being involved with Andres, though; he spoke Portuguese and often went to Bahia. In my house we didn't listen to a lot of music. My father was a soccer coach, and my mother was a model. The only thing we heard was Brazilian music - bossa novas and sambas - and that was the only musical influence I got as a child. So this is a kind of homage to my childhood, and the songs I heard then."

For all that the musical flavors of Brazil run through the record, there's hardly anything Mexican about the disc - at least in the sound.

"I'm very Mexican," Guerra noted, "but I'm always trying to reach for something different, and I don't have any influences from Mexican music, because I didn't hear it. I do what I feel - it's very pure. I can't really explain it, because at the end I'm explaining myself, and that's not easy!" Lyrically, however, Guerra tackles issues that worry her in her homeland, but also resonate around "the whole world." A prime example is "Yo No," where her voice cries over a skittering rhythm, singing about violence against women. "I believe that at times we don't respect ourselves, and we should. Sometimes I think we just don't care about ourselves. I explain to people that I need my space, and I need people to respect that, as I respect it for them. We did a video about the women who've been killed in Juarez in the last 10 years. It bothers me. It bothers me as a women, and it bothers me that no one's done anything about it. When I wrote "Vete,"it was about the indigenous people in Chihuahua. All the world's looking at Chiapas, but there are so many indigenous communities that need attention."