For those unaware, Lisa Morales mixes genres but focuses on Spanglish as an art form on her latest album Sonora. Featuring Duets with Kelsey Wilson (Sir Woman), A J Haynes (Seratones), guests David Pulkingham, Michael Ramos, Jojo Garza, Christina Steele, Michael Longoria, her son, Thomas Spencer, John Speice and Mario Castellanos, and with Producers on board such as Michael Ramos, Jason Burt, Carlos Alvarez and Lisa working seamlessly together, they most assuredly stamp their collective marks on different songs to make an eclectic album that sonically and organically works together.

The Lisa Morales you hear on her fourth solo album, Sonora (out September 13th, 2024 on Luna Records) is decades removed from the precocious nińita who was not yet in grade school, who used to sing mariachi songs with her sister Roberta at Mexican restaurants when they were growing up in Tucson, Arizona. But measure that span between then and now by melody and memory, and the distance shrinks to a heartbeat.

1. Flores (En Jun Jardin)
2. It’s A Common Thing
3. En El Limbo
4. What Do You Want
5. Impostor (feat. Kelsey Wilson)
6. Hermanitas in the Rain
7. Adios Mi Vida
8. Have It All
9. La Paz (feat. The Seratones)
10. Hermana

This dutifully elegant, sublimely sculpted new recording opens on the resoundingly fruitful Flores (En Jun Jardin) and a dutiful hipsway that flows throughout It’s A Common Thing and then we get the all-embracing En El Limbo, the guitar-veined soft rock-hued ballad What Do You Want and the simply beautiful Impostor (featuring Kelsey Wilson).

Along next is the broad smile of the sunny swirls and twirls within Hermanitas in the Rain, which is in turn followed by the stridently-sculpted Adios Mi Vida, an aching yearn that drives the enraptured Have It All, the album rounding out on the low slung, rhythmic ballad La Paz (featuring The Seratones), closing on the emphatic Hermana.

The first single/video, “Hermanitas in the Rain,” a tribute to her longtime musical partner and sibling, Roberta, will be released on July 23rd. “I started writing this song three days before my sister, Roberta, passed,” recalls Morales. “I went into her room to have her help me with it, but it was hard. I had all these beautiful memories flooding back to me in that moment. I wrote it all in a matter of minutes but didn’t realize it was done, music and all until I brought it back out a year and a half later.”

“When we were little girls in Tucson, AZ, the monsoon rains in July and August would fill the busy streets around the block. Roberta would grab me, and we would sit on the curb to get splashed by the cars driving by! I put in pieces of our culture in this song, lyrically. Mom crawled to the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico City to be able to have us — in the song, I refer to “Guadalupe-she watches over.”

“We sang in Spanish before we sang English,” Morales says of the Mexican music that soundtracked and informed her life “from being a toddler on up” — up, in fact, to the present day.

Lisa and Roberta sang that music not just at restaurants at their father’s behest but at every family gathering (“practically bi-weekly,” she laughs), together with their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins by the dozens. And on the rare occasions when they weren’t singing themselves, they still marinated in the music daily, from the beautiful boleros on the family turntable to endless hours of Sonoran rancheras (“Mexican country music,” as Lisa calls it) on the radio. Of course, there was plenty of non-Spanish music in that formative air, too; an older brother had a rock band, and one of her many cousins just happened to be Linda Ronstadt.

“Hermanitas in the Rain” - Lisa Morales [Official Music Video]

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