At the 2018 New Mexico Music Awards, singer/songwriter Lara Manzanares won Best Album for Land Baby and Best Packaging for its CD package design. The Tierra Amarilla native/Corrales resident, who returned to New Mexico a couple of years ago from California, is not resting on her laurels, though. She has a new single, “Dear John,” available on the usual digital outlets on April 10, and she’s working on a clutch of new material. Manzanares is also making connections across the state that will expand her musical experience. Earlier this year, she signed on with Carlos Medina to play guitar and sing backup with his “psychedelic mariachi” band on a March tour through the Southwest. She’ll be featured at Kristina Jacobsen’s Songwriter Showcase at 7:00 p.m. at Winning Coffee on April 9. Looking ahead, she’ll be appearing at the Nuevo Americana Fest, produced by singer/songwriter Chris Arellano, in Costilla on July 6 and at Festival Eclectica in Angel Fire on August 10.

Lara Manzanares
“Dear John” (indie)
A review
Lara Manzanares handed me her album Land Baby at a singing workshop we both attended last fall (an energizing experience conducted by Alejandro Tomás Rodriguez of Engine). Seeing the sticker for Best Album from the 2018 New Mexico Music Awards, I wasted no time in slipping it into the CD player, and I was rewarded with 12 excellent and diverse originals in English and Spanish. They cover a range of subjects drawn from personal experience—from census taking to lost love to correspondence between her ancestors—and they prize feeling over flash. (They motivated me to cover Manzanares in “Tiempo,” my monthly music column, in the February edition of Albuquerque The Magazine.)

“Dear John” adds another chapter in the same vein. The song came to Manzanares in a rush of tears and lyrics and bits of melody as she sat in her car outside her doctor’s office, having arrived early for an appointment. She continued writing as she sat in the waiting room. “It was just tumbling out of me onto the page,” she says. Even during her appointment, she stayed focused on the song. “The doctor must have thought I was—I don’t know—on drugs or something.”

Sensitively produced by Jono Manson and Manzanares, the song delivers a good-bye letter to John, but it’s not the typical Dear John missive that informs the recipient that his lover has found a new romantic partner. In this letter, the singer is ceding the field to another woman who “needs you more than I do.” The singer concludes, “I love you, John/I’m going away.”

Manzanares, who plays acoustic guitar and piano on the track, knew exactly how she wanted it to sound before she went into the studio. She called on Jordan Wax (violin), with whom she worked out a vocal/violin duet in advance, in which the two never quite meet, reflecting the relationship between the correspondents. Manson (guitar), Justin Bransford (bass), and Mark Clark (percussion) complete the excellent backing band.

As on many of the tunes on Land Baby, Manzanares makes use of wordless humming to deepen the feeling. “At that point, my voice is just another instrument,” she says. “There’s a lot you can convey with no words.” Words or not, Manzanares manages to convey quite a bit.