Carla Morrison Talks Embracing Soul-Searching Journey With ‘El Renacimiento’: ‘I Just Wanted to Come Back to Life’

Griselda Flores
·5 min read
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Carla Morrison recalls the exact moment she knew something was off. It was just minutes before her concert in Cancun back in 2017, which seemed like it was about to get cancelled because it started pouring rain. “I remember thinking, ‘Ugh, please just let it get cancelled,'” the 35-year-old artist recalls saying. “I was over it.”

It was the first time in her career, which she began at the age of 15, that she questioned if making music truly made her happy. “I just felt like people were more enamored with my work than I was. Now that I think back on it, I was really depressed. But at that time, I didn’t know I was.”

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She had two options: choose herself and step away from music, or keep going and be “unhappy.” She ultimately decided the former, after conversations with her family, her management team and her then-boyfriend (also co-producer, and now her husband) Alejandro Jiménez. She didn’t know how long she’d be gone, she explained to them. “I was like I’ve been working all my life towards this and now I want to take a break. My U.S. manager Gil [Gastelum] was like, ‘OK, take a break, it’s fine, don’t worry about it.’ My managers in Mexico asked when I was coming back and I said I didn’t know. I had no songs, no inspiration, I couldn’t feel anything.”

For Morrison to say she couldn’t feel anything is almost unbelievable. She’s known for her stripped-down ballads, which are usually ultra-emotional. She’s often cried onstage while singing — and her fans wouldn’t hold back tears either, allowing themselves to be moved by Morrison’s emotionally-layered lyrics and delicate vocals. Her 2012 album is literally called Déjenme Llorar (Let Me Cry), which won her a Latin Grammy for best alternative music album. In 2015, she released Amor Supremo, which peaked at No. 1 on Billboard‘s Top Latin Pop albums chart. Two years later, she re-recorded the chart-topping set adding two new songs calling the acoustic album Amor Supremo Desnudo.

For years she had been singing love songs dedicated to others. Her new album, El Renacimiento (The Rebirth) — released Friday (April 29) — is also about love, but these new songs are love letters to herself. “It was so nice because I was focusing on myself. I would always focus on others. As humans we tend to do that. That’s why we feel very lost,” she says. “Writing for me felt like giving myself a really nice hug. It’s been both spiritual and nurturing.”

Getting to the point of wanting to write music again didn’t happen overnight. In 2017, when she decided to to get away, Alejandro was already moving to Paris. “I had never dreamt about going to Paris — I’m pretty basic. But Alejandro had been wanting to study a master’s in Paris, and when I decided to go on a hiatus, I thought that could be the place where I could let myself go.”

After figuring out visa stuff, they settled down in Paris — where, after a year of living there, she enrolled in a music conservatory, joined a jazz ensemble and started hanging out with musicians. Then, she got an itch to write, and it was terrifying. “I was still mad at music,” she admits. “This career is so demanding, I had no idea who I was as a person anymore. I was also scared and defensive, because that part of my life had destroyed me. But this two-year break of not writing or touring really helped me heal. It’s like I had to die in order to come back. I thought, ‘If I were to write again, it would be in baby steps.'”

Those baby steps eventually led to her writing songs for her new set that are also more experimental in terms of sound, slightly departing from her folk-pop/acoustic sonics and embracing more rhythmic and uptempo beats. She started writing again in 2019, but never had a due date for a new project in mind. Then the pandemic hit and it upended her stress-free plan. “I thought, ‘I really might not even get to do this ever again,'” she remembers. “The pandemic made me put a due date for my album because people were dying. Family members were dying. I had isolated even without a pandemic. Now, I just wanted to come back to life, and I wanted everyone else to also come back.”

She adds, “Every song, I did it with my heart and soul, using this experience as a reflection of what was happening. At some point it was hard, rediscovering myself, making music to survive mentally and spiritually. I wanted it to include songs that made sense for someone who is soul-searching and asking questions they had avoided asking.”

The end product is a raw and honest representation of what Morrison has been going through these past years: depression, anxiety, mourning the loss of her father and transitioning from Paris back to the U.S. (she now lives in Los Angeles). Her writing was as intentional as ever. She wrote to heal. At times, it was hard to even sing the lyrics she had written because it made her realize how broken she was. Writing “Hacia Adentro,” which opens the 12-track set, was cathartic. “I started writing and started crying — the entire demo of that song I’m just crying,” she says. “I was able to go back to that place and differentiate the darkness from the light. It became a mission to make the album in that direction. These songs are about me, feeling lost, like a loser — it’s almost embarrassing to admit. But I know other people are feeling that way.”

After her life-changing show in Cancun, Morrison is ready to hit the road again with her El Renacimiento U.S. tour, which kicks off May 12 in L.A. “Everything that I do has an intention now and so I’m not constantly interrupted by my own thoughts,” she explains. “In Paris I learned that I’m a highly-sensitive creative person and I have to accept that. When I accept that, I put limits. That’s when life just flows better, everything starts making sense.”

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