Natalia Lafourcade Encourages Students to Explore Their Own Worlds

The Mexican guitarist and singer shared her career journey with students. 

November 13, 2019

When Natalia Lafourcade was six years old, she suffered a head injury after being kicked by a horse. “I couldn’t walk for a while,” she told a packed house of students at a recent clinic in David Friend Recital Hall. The injury also left her with dyslexia and poor eyesight, which caused her to struggle in school. Lafourcade’s mother, a pianist, developed an approach that “mixed music and therapy,” Lafourcade told the students, in order to help her daughter recover. 

Now a successful recording artist, Lafourcade has won 10 Latin Grammys and one Grammy Award, released eight studio albums, and been featured in the Oscar-winning 2017 Pixar film Coco, singing the song “Remember Me.” In a lively discussion that mixed Spanish and English, she urged students to stay true to their own creative identities. 

“My journey has been a long process of building and rebuilding myself to find out who I am,” she said. “We are all different, and we each have a world to explore.” She shared her songwriting process, performing several numbers along the way, and added, “Everyone has something different and special. It’s alright to be different—to be you.”

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