She required reconstructive surgery after the incident and had brain inflammation so severe that when she tried to look up, all she saw was black. Even when she was well enough to leave the hospital, she had difficulty walking more than a few steps. Lafourcade was a talkative and impetuous child, but in the first months after her injury she was taciturn and reserved. Doctors told Silva Contreras that her daughter might never be the same. “They said I might not be successful in school, I might not be successful in my career,” Lafourcade said.
“I told them no,” said Silva Contreras, staring at me across the table at dinner after they are hot show. “I'm going to bring her back.” Silva Contreras told me that she knew her daughter had rare musical abilities (when Lafourcade was just nine months old, her mother forced her to harmonize with the sounds of their vacuum cleaner). Now Silva Contreras tried to use music to help Lafourcade regain his development. “The first problem was willpower,” Silva Contreras said. “I needed observation, imitation, curiosity.” Inspired by Montessori education, Silva Contreras followed Lafourcade's interest. If one day she wanted to dance, they danced; if on another day she wanted to sing songs, they sang songs. Silva Contreras is convinced that this winding path brought Lafourcade back to herself.
Choosing a coleslaw, Lafourcade said the mark the experience left on her — beyond the thin horseshoe-shaped scar between her eyebrows — was trust in her own intuition. In those early years, following her passions, she regained her motor skills and relearned how to speak. After two months of treatment, she returned to school, where music remained her obsession. Around the time she turned ten, Lafourcade and Silva Contreras moved to Mexico City and she became obsessed with the idea of becoming a singer. Silva Contreras didn't take it seriously at first. But she helped Lafourcade set up a recording studio in their bathroom, complete with keyboards and an eight-track set. One day, Silva Contreras received an unexpected call from a representative of the Mexican media conglomerate TV Azteca; Lafourcade called the company looking for a role, and now she was offered to try out for the music program. Silva Contreras decided to let her audition, believing it could be a learning experience. “There were a hundred girls there. They all looked like Barbie,” recalled Silva Contreras. Surprising her mother, Lafourcade was a success, and at fourteen she joined the teen pop trio Twist, performing on the television show of the same name.
Over dinner, Lafourcade talked about these years without a hint of pleasure in her voice. “I was too young,” she said. The rest of the Twist members teased her when they saw the embroidered bag her mother made for her. They said she was “too hippie” and that they would kick her out. Lafourcade, sitting opposite me, smiled with sharp satisfaction. “But the opposite happened,” she said. Less than a year later, the Twist television channel was disbanded, but the group's manager began working on creating a new group around Lafourcade. At some point, the radio station invited new potential bandmates for her. “They were amazing girls. They were teenagers, but they looked like adults. They looked like the Spice Girls,” Lafourcade said. “They’re too tall—I’ll look ridiculous,” she told her manager. “You’ll grow up,” he said, shrugging. (At forty-one, she was still under five feet tall.) She began recruiting friends from her school, a music academy called Fermatta with a campus in Mexico City. By this time, she realized that her voice was only part of why the industry loved her or other artists. “I chose friends who seemed very beautiful to me,” she said. “But I learned that they weren't 'good for TV.' »
Ximena Sariñana, who today is a famous Mexican singer and actress, was a year younger than Lafourcade in Fermatta. Sariñana remembers Lafourcade as “an absolutely popular girl.” “I was in the cafeteria with my music nerd friends who only listened to grunge and Pearl Jam, and all of a sudden Natalia walked into the cafeteria surrounded by a bunch of her friends,” Sariñana said. “She made a lot of noise – she was so fashionable, loud and always, always very myselfvery comfortable in my own skin.” One day, Sariñana was doing homework with her headphones on when Lafourcade walked up and tapped her on the shoulder. In a friendly tone, Lafourcade told Sariñana that she had heard that Sariñana was a good singer. Lafourcade became more serious: “What are you talking about? Really good singer? she asked. Lafourcade was still writing and recording her own songs and needed support. “When we spent time together at the piano and I realized what she wanted to do, I thought, 'OK, I understand why she wants really good singers,'” Sariñana said. After a few semesters, Lafourcade dropped out of school: she had a contract with the Sony record company.
