“I became alive again, because now I’m here. I’m back on my own terms.”

“I do feel like we’re in a moment in music and in time where everything goes,” Carla Morrison tells Apple Music about the new stylistic direction. “Even though it’s more pop, it still has its essence.” Ten years have passed since the release of the Mexican singer’s full-length debut, Déjenme Llorar, and its now iconic title track, both of which went on to earn her accolades and audiences alike. Shedding some of the more indie sensibilities of her catalogue, El Renacimiento finds her wielding a broader set of modern pop tools with which to express herself. Drawing from a change in location to Paris and a series of events in her personal life, the 11 songs included here tell an album-length story with emotional depth and range. “El Renacimiento is about coming back to life, because I definitely feel like I was dead for a long time—dead alive, just not happy,” she explains of the album’s overarching and semi-autobiographical themes. “I became alive again, because now I’m here. I’m back on my own terms and better than ever.” Read on to learn more about the stories behind each song.

“Hacia Dentro”
“I remember we were at the studio in Paris that we had rented out. We were just jamming. Then my husband, who’s my producer all these years, he was like, ‘Hey, Carla, all your songs are cool and everything, but you’re not talking about what you’ve been through. You’ve been through hell and back, and you’re not talking about it.’ And I was like, ‘Oh, well, I don’t want to go to that place.’ The song came to me in, like, 15 minutes, like boom—it was really fast. Then I fell in love with the song, and I thought, ‘This is a perfect intro to the album, because it explains how sad and lonely and depressed I felt, and how I did not know about this until I finally took time for myself and allowed myself to really feel all these feelings that I had been kind of bottling up or ignoring.’”

“Diamantes”
“This song was supposed to be on Déjenme Llorar, but I don’t know why I didn’t like the demo. So, this time around, my husband and his brother, they’re like, ‘Let’s work on it, come on. Just give this two days, one day—we’ll work on it.’ I finally loved it, and it ended up being a single because we loved it so much.”

“Una Foto”
“I haven’t experienced the modern dating life. I mean, I don’t think I’m going to ever experience it again, because I’m married now. But I know that a lot of people now—it’s all about texting and sending pictures, and it’s all very digital-romance. So, even though it’s a love song and it talks about breaking up, at the same time when I hear it, I kind of feel like I’m telling myself, ‘I just have a picture of the past and you’re not that anymore.’”

“Te Perdí”
“On this particular track, I wanted to focus on how I was admitting that I had lost, that it was my fault, that I made the mistake. I find it very empowering to take responsibility for our actions, because sometimes we tend to blame other people—but sometimes we fuck up. Sometimes we just don’t make the effort. We’re the ones that are responsible for something not working out. On my other albums, I tend to be like, ‘Oh, my God, I love you, but you didn’t love me back.’ This time, part of that growth process and part of this taking ownership of my own actions was this song saying, ‘I lost you, te perdí, because I didn’t see the value in our lives.’”

“Ansiedad”
“I’ve had anxiety since I was nine years old. It’s taken years of therapy and soul-searching just to find what kind of person I am, what kind of personality I have, who I am as a person, as a human being, as a woman. I feel like mental health in the Latin community and people of colour, we don’t really talk about it because we just—we are told that God will solve all of our problems. And if we have faith and we pray at night, it will go away. And yes, that will help for sure, but that won’t solve the whole problem, because we’re not only spirit—we’re mind and we’re body. And so, we need to do something about it. ‘Ansiedad,’ to me, is like sharing an experience of a panic attack, of something happening in real time and how it feels, also an experience that you can share with people that don’t have panic attacks and that don’t understand.“

“Soñar”
“When I left Mexico and I moved to Paris, I remember I cried for the first three hours on the plane. I was just like, thank you, sorry I had to leave—so many emotions. I was so just depressed and sad, and I had felt so unvalued and just so bullied and rejected in so many ways. I think it’s OK to just say, ‘I want to dream, and I want to see what I can do with myself.’”

“No Me Llames”
“I come from a very small city in Mexico called Tecate, which is on the border of San Diego. The people that live in my city, we’re very happy with just basic stuff. We don’t need a lot of things. We just need family, friends, food, and that’s it. When I became this public figure, everybody was expecting something from me, and now I was suddenly an example to a lot of girls and boys. With this song, even though it’s a heartbreak song, what I’m really trying to say is I’m not going to take anybody’s shit anymore, and I’m going to take ownership of my career and my life. I’m powerful now.”

“Obra de Arte”
“I just wanted to talk about self-love. To me, self-love was something that I never really practised before making this song and before moving to Paris. For some reason. I just wasn’t taught that. Even though my mom is an awesome woman and I’m here where I am because of my mom, it was never, like, a movement. It was more of, like, an attitude. It was more of like, ‘Yes, you can be whatever you want. You can have any dreams that you want.’ Even though the feminist movement reminds us about everything that we don’t have—and I think that’s great because that helps us to really keep fighting the fight—I do feel like there’s a good place where we can talk about what we do have and what we do offer to the world."

“Divino”
“‘Divino’ was actually inspired by a picture I saw on the Metro in Paris. It was blue, and the girl was wearing a small, black dress, but it was just so beautiful. Parisians have this really good taste in design and so, when I saw it, it just made me think a lot about Salvador Dali’s paintings. And all these images just came into my mind. I thought, ‘What if Pablo Neruda or Federico García Lorca, these really beautiful poets from the past, lived now? If I were them, what would I say to a woman?’”

“Contigo”
“I was talking to a friend that was starting to date again. She hadn’t dated in a long time, and she told me, ‘This time just feels right.’ And I remember thinking, ‘Wow, that’s something I felt when I started dating my husband.’ I showed it to my husband, and he started writing with me, and we made this song together. I mean, we did all of these songs together, but this song in particular was a very, very special song between us. Everything that went wrong in my past just makes sense, because it prepared me to be with this person and to see the value and the beauty in it."

“Encontrarme”
“I’m talking about how I want to find myself again. It’s a very eternal question we keep answering ourselves in different times of our lives: We want to come back to ourselves, because life is so full of different experiences, and you just change paths and change dreams and change purposes every now and then. But the end of the day, the essence and the spirit that you have within yourself is the same. I feel like this story can [resonate] with so many people: women that have become moms, people that have started a new job or that change paths, or somebody that doesn’t feel like a guy anymore and wants to become a woman. Anybody that just wants to start life on their own terms again, I think this is a song that could heal them.”