Eight years after the Tierra Amarilla native Lara Manzanares released her award-winning album Land Baby, this weekend she’s launching an engaging and accomplished new album of original tunes, Yo Soy de Ti, with concerts in both Santa Fe and Corrales, presented by AMP Concerts. It’s definitely been worth the wait.

The songs on Lara Manzanares’s multifaceted Yo Soy de Ti cover multiple styles and multiple topics. You’ve got americana, Hispanic polka, a capella, Western swing, to name a few genres, with Manzanares singing about New Mexico history, the hard decisions forced by ranching (she grew up on her family’s sheep ranch and weaving at their Tierra Wools shop in Los Ojos) and the lives of her northern New Mexico ancestors, love and its loss, a magic room, and the weight of a debilitating illness that plagued her for years before finally coming to a resolution in late 2024.

What holds it all together—aside from the superb production by Manzanares and Jono Manson of The Kitchen Sink studio in Sante Fe—is Manzanares’s distinctively soulful and intelligent songwriting and her commanding performance. Over the last eight years, she has developed an instantly identifiable voice in her writing and her performing, and it hasn’t come easily.

“It feels like this album is sort of a momentous occasion in my life in a way,” says Manzanares, “because I feel like I’m really me.” The first album she was trying to figure things out, she says, figure out who she was as a singer/songwriter. “I feel like I have grown into myself more in this album, and I’ve shed some things, for sure, in the process of making this album, both metaphysically and very much physically. I feel like I had several barriers, if that’s the right word. I feel proud of how doggedly I’ve persisted in the face of some real challenges.”

Physically, she’s had three recent surgeries to address a severe case of endometriosis, which had been misdiagnosed for years. In the middle of the process of producing the album, she had a radical hysterectomy, a life-changing procedure that, while not a cure, has resolved the pain and revived her energy. On the romantic front, a promising relationship lost its promise.

“It was good to have something to work on,” she says, and work on it she did—from songwriting, performing, and producing to photography and graphic design. (She’s got an MFA from California College of the Arts, and incidentally, she’s an accomplished weaver.)

The songs, in English, Spanish, and Spanglish, brim with life. There’s the magical realism of “Margaret’s Dream,” written in a “magic room” with its painting of a toucan in Margaret’s house in El Rito. Margaret had praised the room’s special acoustics and wanted Manzanares to experience them. “We went into that room back there, and she handed me her guitar, and I sat down, and I stuck a capo on it at a random place and just started strumming. . . . And the first couple of verses just came out, and into the chorus, too.” Then, there’s the portrait of a “Sensitive Soul,” written in the studio from a snatch of lyrics Manzanares had scribbled in a notebook. “The Big Man (Veritas Atrox)” demonstrates that the greed, ignorance, and hate of rulers is nothing new, and it is charged with a piercing cry of resistance. “Tall Woman” swings through the “short, short town,” and “San Pancho” remembers the gift of loving that came from San Francisco: “Porque fuiste tú que me enseñó a querer.” The seriocomic “Primos” catalogues the lives of ancestors and related family friends. Five more well-crafted tunes grace the album, including the title track, whose title holds multiple meanings.

Manzanares will open her concerts in duet with Felix Peralta, performing songs they have written together. She’ll then be joined by her band: Josh English (guitar), James Raymond (keyboards), Justin Bransford (bass), and Mo Roberts (drums). Special guests, in addition to Peralta, will include Jono Manson, Jordon Wax, and more.

The album will start streaming on the usual platforms on Friday and will also be available on Bandcamp, and there will be CDs and vinyl available at the concerts.

Lara Manzanares Album Release Concert
Thursday, November 20, 7:00 p.m.
Unit B
21 W. San Mateo Road, Santa Fe
SOLD OUT

Lara Manzanares Album Release Concert
Sunday, November 23, 7:30 p.m.
Historic Old San Ysidro Church
966 Old Church Road, Corrales
For tickets and more info, go here.

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