How the kick of a mare promoted the musical career of the acclaimed Mexican singer Natalia Lafourcade

But at some point in his childhood, as a result of that same impetus to take risks, his family was told that he would never achieve a career, much less such a fruitful one.

When he was six years old, he tells the BBC Outlook program in the middle of the premiere of his most recent “song” album, Lafourcade was kicked on the forehead by a mare.

The accident occurred at the ranch of some friends of his family, during his birthday party, when the girl, full of curiosity, decided to disobey his mother.

“I remember the ranch a lot, I remember my mother being very strict and telling me that I could not get on a horse because everyone was very large,” he says.

However, that was the gift that Lafourcade yearning. So he took advantage of when his mother, María del Carmen Silva, also a musician and also Pedagogue, entered with the rest of the adults to the house.

The singer -songwriter was waiting for her chance in a patient, in a swing, next to a friend. Once he lost sight of his mother, they decided to approach one of these animals.

“The horse moved from place, it became nervous,” he says. “I was very close to its hind legs and then …”.

Little Lafourcade fell to the ground, with a wound that extended from the hair line to her left eyebrow, a scar that still retains.

I would need 18 points of suture, reconstructive surgery and remain without almost being able to see or talk.

“It was a tough recovery. I was very inflamed, confused. With much difficulty doing things, seeing, walking for a while,” he says.

However, that long recovery process would bring her closer to music like nothing else.

After the incident, the news of the doctors were not encouraging for the artist's parents.

It had high chances of being brain and permanent neurological damage.

“They said: he will not be able to get to university. With work, he may end the secondary or primary school. He will not be able to have a career,” he says in his interview with BBC Outlook.

Lafourcade had to start a hard regime of medicines, speech and language therapies, as well as physical therapies.

The doctors recommended an extensive exercise routine, which her mother made sure the little girl fulfilled. Although María del Carmen decided not to take the instructions of the doctors to the letter and added to the therapies their own ingredients: rhythms, melodies, arpegios, musical scales and progressions.

“It was an integral learning, I remember it. I trained hatred, but there was also movement and calm,” he says.

His therapies accompanied by music, which then endorsed the health professionals themselves that attended him, became a custom during his childhood.

“Everything was learned in very playful ways, with children's stories, who talked about our environment and invented my mother and I. Sometimes we visited some friends of her on their ranch, whom they had called Rocío. They were hours on their way where we played to sing, compose and tell stories. I never saw him as a work or obligation. I think that all that saved me,” he says.

None of this was strange because his parents are musicians.

While María del Carmen is an expert in Musical Education, her dad, Gastón Lafourcade, is a university professor, pianist and closure.

The couple separated when the artist was only three years old, but ensures that music inherited from both.

“When I was with my mother, I spent the morning at school and afternoon in her music classes. One class after another. And then I went with my dad and he played traditional music, played folklore, tangos, bach, very complex pieces. I also saw her giving her piano classes, doing her carnations, working with the wood,” he says.

“This childhood event was a very strong trigger for me to be closer to music,” he says.

At ten years old, recovered from his accident, he moved with his mother from Veracruz to Mexico City.

Lafourcade now lived in a dense capital, full of diverse sounds and cultural expressions of all kinds.

There he finished “obsessing” for music.

“Just arrived in Mexico City, I discovered all these ranch music groups that were in restaurants and in other places. I became obsessed with ranch music. I did not recommend my mother or my father. The music of José Alfredo Jiménez was a taste of my childhood, I don't know why, but something of my being connected with her,” he says.

“Then I had the opportunity to sing in a school event with a real mariachi and I remember that everything in my body went on to me, I put chicken skin. I said: 'This is what I want to do!'”

Although he was very young, Lafourcade already had his future decided. I sang every time I could. The public, he says, praised him, but still needed training and exhibition to become the star he was looking to be.

In his preteen season, he decided to call the Televisa and TV Azteca on hidden every day.

He was a fan of programs transmitted by the television stations in which children singing and dancing were presented.

“We had an apartment in the San Rafael neighborhood. When my mother was going to give her classes very close to the department, she left me at home. And I learned to call the operators of Televisa and TV Azteca,” he says.

“Every day, when I called TV Azteca, a lady named Rosita answered.

He thought that his mother would never find out about the calls, that one day he would receive an answer from a cazatalentos, and he would have the opportunity to enter one of the programs.

She was never invited to an audition. His mother, however, did know.

“I never imagined that my mother was going to realize for the phone receipt that I was finishing the line with all those calls,” he says, as he releases a laugh.

But he had a huge effect in María del Carmen, who then decided to enroll her daughter in a talent academy, so that she learned not only music, also dance and song.

In that school called Black, which still exists in Mexico City, according to Lafourcade, he tried careful until, at six months, he received a call to make an audition.

Thus began his professional career, with only 14 years, in the TWist female pop group.

It was several years part of that musical group, with which he toured in his country that served as a school. And a very intense.

“My mother was scared, my dad or speak and I was happy. What was strong was to give concerts daily, to make promotion, travel to different places of the Republic and, while the school ended, living in hotels and trucks,” he says.

But work on Twist did not fill him completely.

“I remember it as a moment of a lot of vulnerability. I liked it, but I was not very sure, because I was missing to play my guitar, my music,” he explains.

Lafourcade was not willing to be molded or conditioned by others, to force her to sing foreign songs, to dance others, to sell foreign music.

His stubbornness, combined with a strong independence and the self -taught influence of his parents, only left him an option.

He left the band, determined to compose his own music, to forge his own path.

“I always had that temperament, I don't know how it would be said, that character. They could never really manipulate me. I wanted to learn some things for that to mold it in my way and create my way,” he adds.

With only 17 years, he released his first solo album and was a success.

During the next two and a half decades, he has produced 11 studio albums, has been presented in places such as Carnegie Hall in New York and Koko in London, and has collaborated with personalities such as Gustavo Dudamel, Alejandro Sanz and Caetano Veloso.

In addition to Grammy, it has been recognized with prizes such as Billboard and the MTV Video Music Award Latin America.

Just when he turned 40 in 2024, finally, although unintentionally, he was fulfilling that birthday desire for his childhood.

“I went out with some friends, but I had no plans to get on a horse, I was just going to accompany them. When I turned, I was already above the horse, in a forest along with Triana, as the mare was called. It was wonderful. Being close to the horses generated a lot of fear. After a long time, I told myself: I am ready, I think I am ready for this therapy.”

The original interview for this note was made by the programa Outlook of the BBC. It was adapted for BBC Mundo by journalist Ronald Alexander Ávila-Claudio.*

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