Early in the spring of 2020, Angélica Garcia felt like she was being called back home. The singer/songwriter had spent the last three years in Richmond, Virginia, but her roots were firmly planted in California.
She’d spent most of her life in El Monte — the city in the San Gabriel Valley just 20 20 minutes east of downtown L.A., where she was raised by her parents and grandparents. (Her mother, also named Angélica, was a singer who had grown up performing rancheras with her siblings at rodeos around L.A. and Mexico.) Angélica spent most of her childhood moving around the city, learning how to fit in each time she enrolled in a new school. At 17, she followed her parents across the country to Accomac, Virginia — a tiny rural town on the state’s eastern shore.
"It was challenging, but I tried to always see the positive side of those experiences," she tells GRAMMY.com. "In some ways it was like traveling back in time to live there, but I also just thought, Wow, this is a whole different culture that I get to be a part of."
After high school, she moved to Richmond and fell into the city’s indie scene, performing in several bands while recording and releasing her own solo music. Her semi-autobiographical track "Jícama" made it onto President Obama's 2019 year-end music list, giving her a boost of recognition just before she released her 2020 album, Cha Cha Palace. The album was a celebration of her Salvadoran-Mexican heritage, bursting at the seams with influences from across the Latin American diaspora, merging cumbia, ranchera, and reggaeton with psychedelic rock and pop.
Just before the pandemic, Garcia felt as if she "was being called to start over in L.A." With COVID-forced closures throughout the city, it wasn’t quite the return Garcia had hoped for. It did, however, present an opportunity for grounding and reconnection — not just with Garcia's hometown, but with roots, culture, and voice.
She turned inward, dredging up gnarled, complicated feelings about her identity. She’d started to find success writing music that she felt deeply connected to, but Garcia was also grappling with the realization that it was written in a language neither of her grandparents spoke. She turned to poetry, trying to work through her feelings of grief and disconnect.
Slowly but surely, those words became the first inklings of Gemelo. Produced by Chicano Batman’s Carlos Arévalo, the 10-track album explores duality and belonging, following Garcia’s journey of acceptance from the ethereal musing of opener "Reflexiones," to the wild joy of closer "Paloma."
Her first album sung almost entirely in Spanish, Gemelo is Garcia triumphing over her doubts, following her intuition into an otherworldly pop soundscape that transcends borders.
Ahead of her upcoming tour dates opening for IDLES, Garcia spoke with GRAMMY.com about processing grief, writing in Spanish, and finding inspiration in her ancestors.
This conversation has been condensed and edited.
What inspired your move back to California?
I loved living in Richmond, but I was having a really hard time towards the end. Moving kind of felt like something that I had to do. That was one of the difficult things that I was navigating around the time of writing Gemelo.
The album touches on the concept of grief and loss, but also discovery. What was going on in your life as you were writing it?
The record feels like traveling through grief. In real life, I was processing some really difficult changes and adapting as a person. I felt like there was a version of me who was going through the motions and phasing in and out of grief. My body was there, but my mind was somewhere else. I felt like I was almost in a dissociative state.
How does that sense of self you were grappling with tie into the album’s title, Gemelo?
It’s funny, it almost feels like the album revealed itself to me over time. I was maybe three or four songs in before I really started to see a through line between them. I wasn’t sure they were going to turn into an album, but they started to feel like part of a body of work.
In the beginning, I think I kept noticing these themes of reflection, the idea of past lives, all these emotions that kept coming up. Later, I was searching and searching for a record title, and I kept seeing the word "twin." I hadn’t actually tried translating it into Spanish, but when I did, it was like a light bulb went off. I heard "gemelo," and everything made sense.
What about the concept of twins were you drawn to?
I often felt like I had this intuition guiding me and helping me through some of these decisions, and helping to protect me. That, to me, is my gemelo. We have the version of ourselves that exists in the physical world, and then we have an intuitive self, a spirit self, that’s guiding us, even when our tangible self is too confused to really understand everything.
Most of this album is in Spanish. What’s your relationship to the language? Did you grow up speaking it?
It’s always been a very core part of my childhood and my formative memories. Most of the people that I love speak Spanish. So even if I wasn’t always exercising it every day, anytime I spoke to the core people in my life — my grandparents, my mom, or my dad — I was always hearing Spanish. It’s also some of the first music that I learned how to sing, so it felt very natural to me to have it in my mouth and on my tongue.
I just realized I’d never actually tried to express myself as a writer, creatively, in this language. I really wanted to honor that side of myself and my family lineage, and give it a shot.
Would you say you express yourself differently in Spanish than in English?
I feel like maybe it was almost easier to write in Spanish. I’ve been a musician for so long that it can be really easy to be like, "Oh, this is how a song should go," or "I should have a chorus that sounds like this." In some ways, because I didn't have the same framework or rules with Spanish, I was leaning a lot on imagery and on concepts in a way that was a very fun and refreshing challenge.
I think it brought out a little bit more of my philosophical side, because I didn't feel the same pressures that sometimes I feel when working on music in English.
Did exploring that side of yourself also help you connect on a different level with your family and your roots?
I always felt a deep connection to my roots. It can be so easy to just get caught up in everyday life, so it's really fascinating when you look back, and you see the similarities between you. It really makes you wonder how much of it is nature and how much of it is nurture? And how many of these things I do were literally inherited, you know?
How did that seep into your writing for this album?
It’s funny, before I moved back to California, a really good friend of mine in Richmond got really into looking up their ancestry. We would just dedicate time to researching our family histories, and things like that. It was nice to do it with a friend, because you had somebody to talk to about it.
As I was learning, I was writing down the names of my relatives and putting them in a specific area in my room where I would meditate a lot. I would journal with the candles lit, and one day, I was sitting in front of that area and the song "Juanita" just poured out of me. The name came out so clearly.
Some songs you labor over for months, or even years, and they might not come out. This one just poured out like it was raining from the sky. Later, I was sitting around a coffee table with my mom and my grandma, and she was like, "Oh, yeah, your great great grandma, Mama Juana. Juanita …" and I was just thinking, Wait, what? My grandma was telling me how Juana was this mystical woman, and I thought, Wow, she really wanted a song.
In addition to "Juanita," your songs really tap into the stories of strong women, feminine joy, and feminine anger. How have the women in your family influenced your music?
I love the perspective of the women in my family because there’s so much personality and resilience. They’re badass. My grandmother would tell me stories about being a little girl in El Salvador selling coffee, and her whole journey to work at the U.S. embassy, which is eventually how she got to the U.S. And my mother, being a child performing rodeos, told me stories about walking from one gig to another in Mexico with my grandpa because the van had broken down.
Sometimes I feel like people like to focus on their material accomplishments, like money or degrees. But the story of my mom walking from a gig as a child in her rodeo outfit, or the fact that my grandmother went from selling coffee in the jungle in El Salvador to L.A.? That's an accomplishment. That's resilience.
They’re full of these vibrant stories, because they had to navigate through so many trials. Because of them, I experienced a lot of love and magic, care, and nurturing. It’s unfortunate to me that those traits are sometimes seen as soft instead of strong, when it’s both. They redefined strength for me.
Gemelo’s final track, "Paloma," feels like such a triumphant celebration. What significance does that song have for you?
I wanted to end with gratitude. "Paloma" is a song about seeing the divine reflected in each other, in the people you love, and how, even when we're extremely critical of ourselves, we all hold the divine within us. We’re all walking this earth with the power to do incredible things. That outlook has really gotten me through so much in life. It can be so easy to get lost in the grief, but the light is what cuts through all of it for me.
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