Marchita

Marchita is the solo debut studio album by Mexican singer-songwriter Silvana Estrada, following two collaborative albums with Charlie Hunter. The album was released January 21, 2022, as her debut release with Glassnote Records. The album was recorded in Mexico City over five days in 2019 with producer Gustavo Guerrero. Estrada first announced the album October 22, 2021, alongside the release of the single "Te guardo", a rerecording of a song that first appeared on the singer's debut EP Primeras Canciones. The album was first conceived after the breakup of Estrada's first relationship, with the lyrics following her journey through first heartbreak. Estrada called the album "like a therapeutic journey ... in order to understand sadness, loneliness, and pain." Estrada called the writing process behind the album "really lonely", explaining that "I started it after a breakup, and it wasn't only the breakup and the dissolution of a relationship — I think I was suffering because I realized love wasn't what I thought it was. It was a kind of pain that was philosophical, so Marchita was an introspective journey that I took to find out what my truth was and my construction of love and why I was feeling so bad. In an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times's Laura Emerick, Estrada explained why the cuatro is so central to the album, saying "It was magical that I got to know the cuatro. A regular guitar was too big, and my hands were too small. I needed something different. I started to play it, and I fell deeply in love. The tuning [of the cuatro] is so special. It sounds unique — modern but also folkloric. My mind was blown away." The cuatro she plays was made by her luthier father. The album's lyrics, originally written in Spanish, received an official English translation by bilingual Mexican poet Mónica Mansour. Estrada started writing some of the songs in 2018, refining them at local concerts so that she had a deep understanding of them by the time she entered the studio with producer Gustavo Guerrero. Guerrero had a goal of recreating the intimacy of those live performances, which he described as "a challenge not to take away the power and expression of Silvana's art", constantly facing the risk of "overproducing or over-polishing something that's already done" or adding excessive layers of instrumentation.