Teen singer gives Latin music new life

MIAMI -- You might think lightning had struck the Latin music world. The electric charge is coming from Natasha Duenas, an unknown 16-year-old from Kendall, Fla., who writes songs of adolescent angst and sings them straight into people's hearts.

Emotion surges through when she sings, a flood of feeling so powerful that first-time listeners and jaded music industry veterans alike often find jaws dropping and tears rising.

Recently Duenas sang for a crowd of Latin music movers and shakers at the South Beach offices of the William Morris Talent Agency. "What if I were perfect?" she sang, a punk rag doll with her enormous eyes, painted sneakers, and denim miniskirt. The cocktail chatter stopped, and some people's mouths just stayed open.

"I've got so much to tell you, that I don't know where to start," she continued, lovingly belting every soaring note. When she finished, they took a collective breath and applauded. She was perfect.

Duenas, who has dreamed of being a rock star since she was 8, says she's not surprised that she has the Latin music world buzzing, or by the astonishing string of events that has earned her a major label record deal. "I'm ready -- I was born ready," she says. "It's my destiny."

Destiny is as good an explanation as any for the too-good-to-be-true story of her discovery. Last summer her father, Guillermo, told a client at his Kendall hair salon, Marta Merlo, about his talented daughter. Merlo offered to take Duenas's demo to her neighbor, Jorge Pino, president of EMI Music US Latin.

"I said, `My God, who is that?' " Pino says. He asked to see her the next day. He had been looking for a young female artist who could replace the now grown-up Shakira in teenagers' hearts. When Duenas showed up with her guitar and her punk mini-kilt and black-painted eyes, playing her own songs, he knew he'd found her. "She walked like a star into my office," Pino says.

"It was kind of like I was on a TV show," Duenas says. "I was very nervous. I remember he said: `This is round one.' It was like a dream, but it was real."

The dream has been getting more real, as EMI has begun promoting the album's July 13 release. Recently three of Duenas's songs went on sale in online music stores, and a single, "Lagrimas" (Tears), has gone to radio.

In July she'll be on an AOL Latino concert series that usually features such stars as Gloria Estefan. All the while she has had to juggle school finals and showcases in South Beach and New York.

Although her album is called "Imperfecta/Imperfect," Duenas is ideal for the Latin music world. Like its mainstream cousin, the Latin music business is floundering, sales sliding no matter how carefully the industry devises marketing strategies for one elaborately concocted pop figurine and radio-ready songs for another. A raw talent such as Duenas, with songs straight out of her teenage psyche and her gut-wrenching voice, seems like a near-miracle.

The girl who could be the next big thing is the daughter of an Argentine father and a Cuban-American mother who grew up in Kendall with her three siblings (Jenny, 26, Jonathan, 14, and Michelle, 13). She was always shy. "Of all of them she's always been the most quiet about showing her emotions," says her mother, Yousi. But she was expressing herself musically before she could talk. As a toddler, she babbled an original melody her parents called the "tushila" song after its baby-talk refrain.

She attended a strict Christian elementary school where even Christian rock -- forget Nirvana -- was forbidden. She constantly got detention for humming. "It was something I couldn't control, kind of like breathing," Duenas says, sitting in her bedroom, the walls papered with a mix of dark-side rock star posters -- Kurt Cobain, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson -- and a teddy bear calendar.

At 8, she was having rock 'n' roll dreams, pounding the piano, and singing to a cousin's karaoke machine. At 13, she persuaded her parents to get her a guitar. A few months later she startled her mother by asking if she'd like to hear a song she'd written, "Definition of Life."

"I thought it was amazing," her mother said. "I said, `You did that? How'd you do that?' "