Separations, homecomings and memories — personal and historical — fill the songs on “Norteña,” the ninth studio album by the Mexican American songwriter Julieta Venegas and her most personal one.
Música norteña is a regional genre that straddles the border between Mexico and the United States: rancheras, polkas, corridos, cumbias. Born in California but raised in Tijuana, Venegas, 55, has crossed that border countless times. On “Norteña,” she said, the border is “almost a character in the album.”
She added, “This theme keeps coming back in the songs: about migration, and about leaving a place where you’re from and looking for something else.”
In the course of making the album, Venegas gradually realized that her songs were telling her something. After eight years of living in Argentina, she felt compelled to return to Mexico. A visit to Mexico City in November 2024 clinched it.
“As soon as I stepped outside of the airport, I’m like, ‘Of course. I have to come back,’” she said over coffee at Cuerno, a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan specializing in northern Mexican food. She wore an asymmetrical gray jacket, a white blouse and dark pants, stylish but unflashy. Her eyes sparkled as she recalled the moment.
“It was like a realization that just came to me,” she said. “After that, I couldn’t stop talking about it. It was like, ‘Hi, how are you?’ ‘I’m coming back.’ ‘Hi, how are you? ‘I’m going back to Mexico.’ I couldn’t stop saying it. It just kept on coming out of my mouth.”
Venegas writes songs that have made her a pop star in Mexico and Latin America for two decades. Her voice is natural and disarming, bright but never overpowering or showy. “I’ve learned to write songs with my limitations,” she said. “That’s what my style is about, just being me.”
Her lyrics speak plainly and directly, most often about the ups and downs of love, and her tunes have an infectious, inviting lilt. She prizes simplicity and deliberately strips her songs of unnecessary convolutions. “My friends are always bothering me because I love writing with simple chords,” she said. “I don’t like writing with complex chords. There are no ninths or sevenths in my songs.
“I always say I’m the ‘Guitarra Fácil’ songwriter,” she added, referring to the “Easy Guitar” series of elementary pop songbooks sold on newsstands in Mexico.
But there’s skillful pop distillation behind the simplicity. “She has clarity,” said El David Aguilar, a Mexican songwriter who co-produced “Norteña” with Venegas and helped write many of its songs. “She knows how to write good melodies that everybody will like and will want to sing.”
In 2012, Rolling Stone named Venegas’s 2000 album, “Bueninvento,” as one of the 10 greatest Latin rock albums. Her 2006 album, “Limón y Sal” and a live follow-up, “MTV Unplugged,” were best-sellers in Latin America and Spain. She has won eight Latin Grammy Awards, including alternative music album (“Limón Y Sal” and “MTV Unplugged”), pop/rock album (“Algo Sucede” from 2015) and pop vocal album (“Tu Historia” from 2022).
Since her 1997 debut album, “Aquí,” Venegas has collaborated with musicians from across the Americas: Silvio Rodríguez from Cuba, Marisa Monte from Brazil, Ana Tijoux from Chile, Mala Rodríguez from Spain, Calle 13 from Puerto Rico and Natalia Lafourcade from Mexico (who rejoins her in a duet on the new album, a song about lasting friendship called “Tengo que Contarte”).
In 2021, the reggaeton producer Tainy invited Venegas to share a track with Bad Bunny: “Lo Siento BB:/” (“I’m Sorry Baby”), a worldwide hit that has been streamed 250 million times on YouTube. Venegas’s voice, lyrics and piano fill its first full minute. She went on to perform it with Bad Bunny for the American Music Awards and onstage in Mexico. Venegas was especially pleased to join a songwriter who respects women. Bad Bunny has “never needed misogyny,” she said. “From his first song, he has had this great vision with women.”
The “Norteña” album is independently released on Venegas’s own label, Lolein Music, and she has written a memoir, “Norteña: Memorias del Comienzo” (“Norteña: Memories of the Beginning”), through independent publishers in Mexico, Argentina, Colombia, Chile and Spain.
The book delves into her abiding connection to Tijuana. “There was always this fight between the Tijuana that people perceived from the outside, through films, and the idea of the people who actually live there,” she said. “We’re not this decadent society. We’re actually decent people, working people.”
The book also details how she made her way, early on, as a songwriter and performer, drawing on the diaries she has kept since she was 14. “When I started working on it, I was like, ‘I don’t want to do a memoir, I want to make another album.’ And then when I started working on this album, I realized that this had to do with memory. So I was like, ‘Oh, so this actually all connects,’” she said.
Venegas will be touring with a nine-piece band, mostly in Mexico and the Southwest, but with a free July 29 concert at SummerStage in Central Park. She’s also making stops at book fairs; the only social media she uses regularly, she said, is Goodreads.
The music on “Norteña” delves into border styles, but doesn’t always conform to their conventions. “I wasn’t going to do a traditional norteño album,” Venegas said. “It was going to be my version of norteño — my imaginary norteño album.”
The album production is almost entirely acoustic, featuring Venegas on accordion joined by the guitar-like Mexican requinto, the bajo quinto (acoustic bass guitar) and occasional strings and brass-band horns. A few songs have synthesizer hooks like 1980s Tejano music, another border style. Venegas sings duets with Aguilar and with José Guadalupe Esparza from the long-running Mexican band Bronco. “When I first went to Mexico City, Bronco would be on the radio all the time,” Venegas said. “Bronco is just such an important part of my emotional existence.”
Growing up near the border, Venegas soaked up Mexican standards along with 1980s pop and rock; she also studied classical piano and took up the accordion. In her teens she gravitated toward Anglo music — the Cure, Suzanne Vega, Sinead O’Connor, Madness — and began performing and writing songs while working at a record store. At 21, she quit her spot in Tijuana No!, a rising local ska band, to move to Mexico City and start her pop career.
She struggled at first, and at one point — in an episode that appears both in the book and in one of the album’s pivotal songs, the corrido “Terca” (“Stubborn”) — she told her family she was thinking of coming back to Tijuana. To her surprise, her mother said, “You’ve already taken flight. Don’t look back.”
Aguilar had encouraged her to add personal details to her new songs. “I wanted to put some truth in the lyrics,” he said. “Most of Julieta’s songs are very general, and I thought that she needed to put in some biographical places, names, years, specific situations. Who she is. And I think people will love to hear that.”
In 2026, writing about the border can’t help but consider immigration. The only non-Mexican collaborator on “Norteña” is a Mexican American group from Washington state: Yahritza y Su Esencia, a group of siblings. Yahritza sings with Venegas in “La Línea” (“The Line”). Its narrator has been deported and separated from a partner, but still proclaims lasting love and hope for a reunion.
Venegas wrote “La Línea” two years ago, before the second Trump administration began; now, she can only hope that its optimism proves correct. “I wanted to express the emotional side of it. I wasn’t trying to be political,” she said. “But in a sense it definitely becomes a political song.”
One of Yahritza’s brothers (and band members) was deported and spent months in Mexico before eventually resolving visa problems. “I didn’t know this had happened,” Venegas said. “But they said it was sort of healing to be able to do the song.”
Yet even “La Línea” is a love song. “I’m a little love-obsessed mythomaniac,” she wrote in her memoir. “My songs are full of its stories, some beautiful, others sad and desolate. Beginnings, endings, in-betweens. But even with everything I’ve written, inspiring me in love, I can’t guarantee anything.”
She expects to keep writing about love. “It’s just such an attractive subject,” she said. “It’s the best thing that we have, not only romantic love but love in every sense. If we don’t have that, what do we have?”
Jon Pareles, a culture correspondent for The Times, served as chief pop music critic for 37 years. He studied music, played in rock, jazz and classical groups and was a college-radio disc jockey. He was previously an editor at Rolling Stone and The Village Voice.
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