Norma Monserrat Bustamante Laferte, known professionally as Mon Laferte, is currently the most successful Chilean singer.
Mon Laferte is s currently the most listened to Chilean artist on Spotify worldwide. She is also the Chilean artist with the most nominations in a single edition of the Latin Grammy Awards. To date she has sold in Latin America 1,500,000 digital copies between albums and singles, making her the Chilean singer with the most sales in the digital era.
From her current home in Mexico, she says, “I needed time for myself” and answers our question about how she’s doing during the quarantine:
“I have good days of great creativity, of being very positive and there are other days where I go to hell. I get super depressed, I think everything is wrong, but I really liked being at home for so long. It had been years since this happened to me because I spent five years on tour, non-stop.”
Many artists agree that creative processes have been multifaceted in isolation. Work and creativity was the sway that Mon also went through:
“When the quarantine started I decided to compose and I sat down every day, I took out the guitar, read, and wanted to do something but no, nothing came out. Like, I felt that I finally had free time and I wanted to take advantage of it but no, I was blocked. To be very honest, I had a super dark moment, I had my appointments with my psychiatrist by video call and I took sleeping pills, waking pills, pills for everything, like a zombie. Until a moment came when I agreed to do nothing and began to relax a lot. When I understood that this was a new life that I had to accept, embrace and that it will not be short (I do not know how long this will last), I hugged it and kind of relaxed. I started to enjoy other things.”
Mon said about the new album “Seis!:
“Se Me Va a Quemar El Corazón is actually the first song in the album. The entire writing process was very solitary, bleak and melancholic, because I was like everyone else, just filled with uncertainty about what was going to happen. So I clung onto my music and my guitar because I thought, if the world ends, I at least want people to know how I was feeling. I wanted to sing about personal experiences, past and future loves, the love I have for my mom and other women. It’s an album filled with honesty. During that time, I had nothing else to do but write and sing. I’ve learned that we live life as if we’re in a hurry. I don’t have time to stop, observe or breathe. With this album, if I had anything, it was time. I had time to really listen to the songs, to rewrite, and that’s something I could never do. For example, the song with Gloria Trevi, “La Mujer,” it’s a song I wrote years ago but stopped performing it because I didn’t like the lyrics anymore. They were toxic. I allowed myself to revisit this song for the album because I had time.”
NMR (photo: press Mon Laferte)
