Morrison’s early recordings presented her as a pop-folk singer-songwriter, relying on guitar and keyboards. Her first full-length album, the largely acoustic “Déjenme Llorar” (“Let Me Cry”), went platinum in Mexico in 2012 and won a Latin Grammy for best alternative music album. Just three years later, Morrison transformed her sound with ‘Amor Supremo’, featuring heavy rock beats and reverberating keyboards for songs about obsessive love. It reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Latin Pop Albums chart. While Morrison promoted it, she agreed to perform acoustic versions of the songs for radio stations and webcasts; finally she decided to rework all the songs and add two new ones for ‘Amor Supremo Desnudo’.
But when her 2017 tour was over, Morrison turned everything upside down. She dropped her management company and stopped touring for the first time since her debut. She moved from Mexico to Paris in 2019 with Jiménez. They passed auditions to enroll at a conservatory in a Paris suburb where Morrison studied jazz singing; it was her first formal music education after ten years as an award-winning songwriter. She immersed herself in Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday and, surrounded by fellow musicians, started writing songs again.
“Carla started to feel much better,” Jiménez said in a separate interview. “I remember the day she wrote something and she showed me the song and I was like, Wow! It had been so long since she had not only written anything, but was once again enthusiastic about music. She had the same old Carla energy.”
As the pandemic began in 2020, Morrison received an unexpected message: Ricky Martin was looking for songs. Morrison and Jiménez sent some possibilities; of the demos, Martin chose to collaborate on a demo and invited Morrison to share lead vocals and Jiménez to produce. The result is “Recuerdo”, which appeared on Martin’s 2020 quarantine EP, “Pausa”, and has been streamed 16 million times on YouTube alone.
In Paris, while working on songs during quarantine isolation, Morrison was ready to change her sound again. “For the longest time I felt very pressured to keep my guitar close,” she said. “I felt very pressured to be this singer-songwriter because I know people love that side of me. But I was also like, ‘No! I listen to Adele, to Sam Smith, to Billie Eilish, to Ariana Grande, to Dua Lipa.’ And I thought, ‘I really want to channel that. I just want to pop. And I don’t want to be afraid.’”
