Rosalía's only constant is transformation. An artist always ahead of her time, she has continually innovated at a speed that many of her peers have stumbled to keep up with. The Spanish artist first broke onto the international stage with an avant-garde, electronic take on her home country's flamenco on the 2018 album El Mal Querer. In 2022 she released Motomami, on which she shifted to an overtly global sound, mixing reggaeton, old school hip-hop and bachata, keeping time with the guttural vocals and claps of flamenco's evocative rhythms.
After Motomami, which took home album of the year at the Latin Grammys, it felt almost impossible to predict where the genre shape-shifter would go next. But on her new album Lux, out Nov. 7, the artist goes all the way back in time, to the classics of symphonic sound and opera vocals. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, the album is maximalist — it plays like a dramatic score for an extremely intense, epic film. Rosalía isn't singing on top of the symphony but rather in tandem with it. The instrumentation fortifies her voice and message as she threads the line of folk music and classical tradition with contemporary electronic accents.
On the album, Rosalía also sings in 13 different languages, taking musical inspiration across the world, from Mexico to China. Lux sounds like it was made by an artist who comes from everywhere, experiencing the whole world simultaneously. When she sat down with me recently in Mexico City, Rosalía said she wanted the record to be big enough to fit all of those parts, to show that despite varied perspectives she could take one idea from one part of the world, hold it up to another, and demonstrate that each is equally beautiful.
Lux is also anchored in ideas of "feminine mysticism," she says — notably the way female saints of eons past and from across the globe have navigated love, lust and mortality — the singer says she feels those stories resonating in her own personal journey. Her goal with making an album this ambitious, she says, is to reconcile her desire to make music that's "to just enjoy" as well as "music that challenges you." On Lux, the mortal and divine are in conversation, and with Rosalía as our guide, we can touch both.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Parts of this conversation were originally in Spanish.
Anamaria Sayre: This is such a big record. It's based in all [of] these archaic, culturally valuable [forms of art, like classical music]. But it almost felt to me like looking at a Michelangelo and feeling identified within it, which has never happened to me. All of a sudden I [saw] myself in [that kind of art].
Rosalía: I think that if I could have fit the entire world in a room, in a record, I would have done it if I could. This is what I could do now, which was Lux, which has these stories from around the world. Because each saint, it's from a different place, then there's a different language used. You can find songs that have some Arabic, songs that have some Chinese, and it all responds to that. Those saints, they are a part of a specific framework. It's a specific culture, it's a specific religion.
Before this interview I was talking to my editor who also heard this album and she was like, I feel like this is less global than Motomami was.
Interesting.
To me, it is the most global — one, the languages is pretty obvious. But two, yes, it's classical. But classical at one point [was] the lingua franca of the world. Same with Catholicism, really. There's that flamenco is based in Arab culture and Spanish folk and all of these…
In Africa…
And I hear South Asian sounds, I hear Mexican sounds…
Persian… so much.
It's just more subtle. And the subtlety to me feels more natural, honestly. It feels like, oh, the world is effortlessly fitting into a sound that does feel more uniform.
I've experienced different things through all these years of traveling and being exposed to other music and being exposed to other cultures. And all of that I think I carry with me with so much love, and I'm like, I want this to be part of this album. I exist in the world and the world exists within me. I feel like hopefully my love is plural and it's infinite. The same way I'm here and everything can be here and how can I explain this in a song? And I tried. That's what you can find in "La Yugular" That's what it's about. My favorite art, it's where it's a little bit blurry — the personal and the universal.
I think a lot of people are probably going to make a Björk connection.
I love Björk. She's the best.
One thing that's struck me about her is that over the years, there have been people trying to invalidate or take away some of the fullness of her genius. Like "oh, you know, it was her collaborators." What you've decided to do [is take] on this really big, storied genre of classical music that has a lot of like pomp and circumstance and ideas of what it should be. Was that a thought in you as you were doing this, that people might think that this isn't all me or that this isn't all my ingenuity?
Whatever people want to think, they think. It's not in my hands. I'm like, can we just go to the studio and make music and time will tell. I don't need to necessarily worry about if people get the type of musician that I am yet. If it takes them time, that's okay. I know my ethic every time I go to the studio. I definitely will never say that what I do, I do it completely alone, because that doesn't make sense. But the Sistine Chapel wasn't painted by many people? Wasn't it a collective effort? They didn't have a workshop, there wasn't a workshop there?
I am very happy to be able to collaborate with other people and learn from other people, but also lead always and have a very clear vision. And pushing and working hard as a musician and as a producer and as a writer. Honestly, like the amount of time that I spent this year… of just lyrics for this project. But I don't do it for the credit. That's not why I am in this job. I'm here because it makes me feel alive and it makes me wake up every morning. That's all that matters.
It sounds very alive to me.
I know that a lot of women can struggle with the credit situation because there are so many credits. Some people can assume that [a] man has done the job for them. But I wish that somebody could do my job — because I would have much more time to be with my family and to not lose significant moments in my life. I wish that I could just press a button and this could happen. It's not the case. I will always honor my position of being able to collaborate, but I also don't have [the] rush for the world to understand who I am.
I do want to ask a little bit about how you came to the sounds. I did interview you a couple of years ago and you told me, my grandma, she would want me to be singing Pavarotti. And [then] I heard "Mio Cristo," [and] you are full in operatic technical excellence.
It took me a year, it took me a year! It took me so long to crack that one.
My grandma [sent me a message] this morning, maybe I can play the audio. [Plays voice memo] She's like, I heard your new song and I loved it, you changed the style, ha ha ha. She's laughing a lot, that I'm doing this now, because I think she didn't see it coming. When I was a kid, [my grandma] would have a lot of Pavarotti records in her place. And she would always be singing while she was washing dishes or whatever. It's funny because it stuck with me. She would say, you know, how could you study flamenco?
The real deal, for her, it was classical music and classical trained voices. I was like, one day I'm going to make a song that my grandma is going to be like, okay, now you got it.
It's also classic [to say] grandma, no, I'm not going to do it. And then [now you're] like, well, I'm 33 and I guess maybe I should do what my grandma told me, right?
They always have great advice. Also, she was the one who put me into God. My first experiences going to church was [with] her, it was Rosalía, Grandma Rosalía. She really taught me so much, she would always do prayers before falling asleep to me and my sister, my cousins. I think that those are maybe my first experiences of this intuition that I've always had.
Intuition, like a spiritual intuition.
I think so.
On this record there's a ton of religious iconography, but it feels spiritual to me in a different way.
Mysticism is the inspiration. It's not trying to fit too much into specific codes, but more of what is my truth, what is my faith and how can I explain this and put it into words which is so hard?
And what you were describing earlier about ["La Yugular"] and ending in the world, and the world ending in you, it kind of reminds me of in Islam, the idea of we're all one soul.
That's the inspiration in that song. That's studying from Islam and being like, okay, so that's the foundations of it. How can I explain these on a song? I'm going to put these ideas, so beautiful, on a song.
And then to use Arabic, which is one of the most beautiful [languages]. It's like, "I love you with a thousand sunsets" as opposed to just "I love you."
The language, I find it's so interesting how much the air [is] important. At the end of the day, the breath, that's where it all starts. That's why in the beginning of the album, after that piano intro, the beginning is a breath. That's the first human sound on the album. I was struggling with recording in Arabic because I'm not used to [using] my throat like this, to make this space, and I don't even think that I got it right but I tried. That was my love letter to Arabic.
But I think that's a beautiful thing, to be okay with the imperfection.
I love the writer Ocean Vuong. And I learned from him, he would say that having that feeling of not having achieved what you wanted all the way with the work that you've done, usually it's okay. The more there's imperfection, the more human it is, there's more beauty, there's more of a story. There's cracks in the lyrics, there's cracks in the music, and Leonard Cohen says that's how the light gets through.
We're talking about imperfection, but more than that is movement. That's something I remember you telling me too, is that the constant for you is transformation. Like you shapeshift. Obviously this is different than your old record, but you shapeshift like 50 times within [Lux] itself.
I think that's what my favorite artists do. They are vessels. I want to stay flexible enough to explain different stories depending on the moment. I think that's how I understand being a musician and being an artist.
Does it ever end?
No. And I hope it never does. I think that my idea of what music is or how I want my music to be, it changes through the years and through time. I think freedom has always been there. How can I be freer? I repeat that to myself over and over.
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