For singer-songwriter Carla Morrison, playing on big stages all around the world is nothing new for the Mexican Indie Pop icon, but one stage — The Hollywood Bowl — has eluded her illustrious career, until now.
“I was like, oh my God, that place is huge. Oh, my God. You know? But I'm excited,” Morrison told NBC Los Angeles. “I feel also people have helped with this — sharing my music and connecting with it. So it's kind of like a whole like an achievement for all of us, you know, not just for me.”
On Aug. 12, Morrison is set to headline the Hollywood Bowl for the first time, with Devendra Banhart serving as the opening act.
“Well, you can expect a beautiful show,” she said. “I just want people to really be able to enjoy that night and and live that night with me because that's that's my Hollywood Bowl, you know? I don't know if I'm going to do it again, but if we're all going to live it together and it's going to be special.”
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The performance will be unlike any in Morrison’s career, which has spanned more than a decade. Morrison was born and raised in the Mexican border city of Tecate in the state of Baja California. She moved to the Phoenix area in her teens before her career exploded in the early 2010s.
Morrison has multiple Latin Grammy awards and currently lives in Los Angeles.
“I do take a moment to look back. I don't do that all the time because I'm just living in the moment trying to take it all in as it's happening because a lot is happening,” she explained. “Sometimes I do see that I've accomplished many things that maybe I wasn't supposed to.”
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One of those things has been writing the title song, “Todo Fue Por Amor” for the film “With This Light,” which is set to be released soon in the United States. The song will also be released in English.
“It was presented to me as a credit song, so I was like, okay, I'll try. And it was more like a tryout. So I was like, okay, we'll see if it works,” Morrison said. “When they told me I was going to be the title song and they wanted it to be like, you know, I was like, oh my God, this is insane.”
But Morrison admits her music career hasn’t always come easy.
She has been vocal about her struggles with mental health, taking a long break before writing and releasing her latest album, El Renacimiento, which was released in 2022.
“With mental health, I feel like as Latinos, we don't like to have those awkward conversations. And so it's something that I definitely look back and I, I feel proud of myself because it hasn't been easy. I know people think, oh, she's on the top, but it's all a struggle,” Morrison said. “Music connects us, you know, all of us. It gives us identity, it gives us strength and helps us to keep on going. And so for me, music is just something that I can't really explain why I chose it. But sometimes I feel like really music chose me.”
Morrison said she is grateful for the opportunity to perform at the Hollywood Bowl and to continue pushing Latino culture to the forefront of mainstream music.
“I feel like it was something that was bound to happen. We're so talented and we just hadn't gotten the attention. I'm so glad for it,” she said. “I do feel like our cultures are people want to hear these stories and want us to be elevated. … It’s all of our cultura that's taking us right there. All of our people, all of our communities.”
