Julieta Venegas Turns Memory Into ‘Norteña’ at LAMC: ‘It Made Sense to Write a Memoir About My Relationship to Music’

Julieta Venegas reflected on how memory, migration and creative instinct shaped her latest album and her new memoir, both titled Norteña, during LAMC on Thursday (July 30). In a Q&A with Rolling Stone deputy music editor Julyssa López, the Mexican singer-songwriter spoke about returning to Mexico, revisiting her Baja California roots and building the emotional world behind her recent work.

The Tijuana-raised musician explained that the project began while she was living in Buenos Aires and missing both Mexico and her family. As she immersed herself in literature and history about Baja California — sparked in part by a photography and memoir project connected to her twin sister and grandfather — the ideas for both the album and book began to converge. “It made sense to write a memoir about my relationship to music, about my family,” she said. “I started building this little 3D world where I could just kind of sit and read and write and do these songs.”

That process ultimately pulled her back home. “It actually brought me back to Mexico,” Venegas said, framing the work as both a creative and personal reckoning. She described the album as a celebration of “norteño-inspired music,” though not a traditional norteño record, but rather one filtered through memory, longing and place.

Some of the session’s highlights came as Venegas reflected on her early years — first learning piano almost by accident, then joining the Tijuana scene with Chantaje as a teenager and discovering songwriting before she fully saw herself as a singer. “I started considering myself a songwriter before I considered myself a singer,” she said, recalling the freedom and chaos of those early band experiences.

She also spoke candidly about authenticity, saying she found her voice less through strategy than through instinct. “I knew what I didn’t want,” Venegas said. “It was all very intuitive.”

Later in the conversation, the singer-songwriter touched on collaborating across generations, including her appearance on Tainy and Bad Bunny’s “Lo Siento BB:/” — which reached No. 51 on the Billboard Hot 100 — while also speaking emotionally about songs rooted in the U.S.-Mexico border and family separation. Of one such song “La Línea” with Yahritza y Su Esencia, she said she wanted to capture “the emotional point of view of what happens. It wasn’t a statistic.”

On Wednesday (July 29), the night before her LAMC appearance, Venegas performed at New York City’s SummerStage.