LARA SOFIA

I am Lara Sofia, independent singer-songwriter. Since I was young, I felt a very special connection with music and a great curiosity for discovering new cultures, as a result of this my music is a mixture of pop, folk, and Latin sounds sung in several languages: Spanish, English, French, and Portuguese.  However, I must recognize that the openness to musical multiculturalism started much earlier for me, at home, from the influence of my father, who since I was a young girl passed on to me a curiosity for discovering music from all over the world.

 

When I was born my parents decided to call me Sofia, but as an adult I decided to choose the name Lara because I believe that everyone should have the freedom to choose their own name, one that strongly resonates with their essence.

 

I was born in Hermosillo, Mexico, a faraway place where the earth boils up beneath your feet. Little by little I’ve become the person and the artist I want to be. I learned how to play the guitar when I was 10 years old and at 16 I started to compose and play music with other musicians. In university, while completing a degree in finance, I decided to complement my education by learning French. Through my language school, I found out that there was a competition organized by the French embassy in Mexico, which consisted of composing a song in French. I decided to enter the competition, taking it as a personal challenge. This challenge came from the frustration of feeling that I was taking my life on a path that didn’t represent what I really wanted. That was how I decided to compose a song for this contest, but I imposed a harsh condition for myself: if I won, I would pursue my dream of becoming a singer-songwriter, and if I lost, I would forget about music and try to make peace with a life in finance or something else. I will never forget the day that I received the call telling me that I had won first prize and since then I have not stopped working on achieving my dream.

 

Later on, I made the decision to emigrate to Canada, the place where I carried out my studies in music at the University of Laval, (Québec, Québec), and at the University of Montreal (Montreal, Québec). Emigrating changes you, makes you question your beliefs, your habits, your objectives, helps you to mold the way in which you perceive life, and thus the way in which you view yourself. You learn to see a great amount of nuance where before you thought that the only existing options were black and white. To discover a new place and its culture helps you to understand the place you came from a little better and how that place has molded you a certain way. 

 

I firmly believe that if opportunities don’t come to you, then you need to create them. That is how I ended up producing my first album, the one that allowed me to enter the world of musical arrangements, recording, and mixing audio, as these parts of the production process were under my control.

 

My first album reflects who I am: my origins, my choices, the paths I have taken, the mysteries of the future and my fate. In a way, we can see how the multicultural nature of Montréal is reflected in my work, at a musical level as well as being multilingual, as this city makes you switch languages throughout the day, and offers you the opportunity to discover people from diverse parts of the world. It was in Montréal that the title of my first album, The desert knows that it is also the sea, was born. Due to an inevitable nostalgia, this album brings me back to the place I was born, Sonora, and at the same time is a metaphor for a look inside oneself that leads us to rediscover ourselves and to make us take notice of the infinite possibilities of our existence.

 

I greatly appreciate the time you have taken to read this. I hope that by listening to my music you can experience a part of my world, but above all, I hope that you can connect with your own inner world. A hug from my heart to yours. LS