Her mood swing pays off
Julieta Venegas widens her fan base with sunnier songs
Mexican pop stars, especially the women, tend to be glamorous types: dolled-up pinups in sexy clothes and thick makeup, and more often than not sporting a soap opera or telenovela on their resume. Think Thalia and Belinda.
Julieta Venegas is a different sort of star. A lank-haired, accordion-toting Tijuana native, Venegas appeared on the music scene in 1998 with "Aquí," a cutting-edge alt-rock collection that was more PJ Harvey than Paulina Rubio. She played raucous squeezebox, programmed beats, and sang sad, intensely personal songs. "Bueninvento," a moody, guitar-driven album, followed. Venegas was embraced by a small but fervent rock en español audience stateside, but her records were nowhere to be heard on Spanish-language radio.
"My early songs were very tormented," Venegas says by phone from her home in Mexico City. "They were metaphorical and hard to understand, and not very profound. It was easy to write melancholy songs. But at some point I thought, 'I've never tried to express something else.' As a songwriter I felt I wanted to try to write something happier. But not corny."
Venegas did just that for 2003's "Sí," an unapologetically sunny collection that was a critical and commercial success. Suddenly Venegas, who performs for the first time in Boston July 10 at the Roxy, had hit songs and a broad fan base.
"She shifted direction but stayed original," says Nic Harcourt, host of the influential program "Morning Becomes Eclectic" on the Los Angeles radio station KCRW and an early Venegas supporter. "My view has always been that if people want to cross over, they need to think about doing songs in English as well as Spanish, but I went to see her in LA, and the audience was at least half Anglo. If the music is that good, it touches people no matter what."
Venegas didn't look back. Three years later, she released "Limón y Sal," another accessible pop-rock album, which won a Grammy for best Latin pop album, a Latin Grammy for best alternative album, and an MTV music video award. Next up: "Julieta Venegas: MTV Unplugged," which comes out in July.
"At first, it was an exercise for me, but it was very sincere, wanting to communicate with people," says Venegas. "Now my writing has shifted. I've come out of my shell. I'm still not a shiny, happy person. I'm more of a skeptic. Observant. Pretty shy. Not uninhibited."
Playing music was a way for Venegas, who was raised in a large family, to forge her own identity. She began classical-music studies when she was 9 and says that "it was my space. It was my place. I have a twin and lots of brothers and sisters and the piano was mine."
Living in the border town of Tijuana, just 20 minutes south of San Diego, Venegas grew up with a foot in two worlds and a passion for both Mexican and US cultures. She went to the movies and did grocery shopping in the United States, worked in a San Diego record store during her teens, and studied violin, cello, theory, and voice at Southwestern College in Chula Vista, Calif. You can still hear echoes of her stint in ska and reggae bands; less obvious is her youthful devotion to David Bowie and Prince. When she was 22, Venegas went to Mexico City for a vacation and stayed - immersing herself in the city's vibrant local music community, bonding with musicians such as Fratta and members of Café Tacuba, who would help launch her career, and picking up the accordion, which would become Venegas's signature instrument. Fourteen years later, she says, the Mexico City music scene is just beginning to bounce back from struggles similar to those challenging the US music business.
"Here it's even worse, and big record labels are scared of signing artists," Venegas says. "But there are new independent labels and people going to MySpace and doing adventurous stuff that I find so inspiring. I wish there were more places for people who aren't formulaic. I hope I'm not the exception. I was definitely lucky." 