Natalia Lafourcade Encourages Students to Explore Their Own Worlds

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.”