Her soulful ballads in Frida earned her international respect, now Lila Downs is laying down her own groove in a “man’s world”

Lila Downs has been crossing borders — within her music and between countries — all her life. As the daughter of a Scottish-American professor and a Mexican Mixtec Indian singer who split when she was still young, Downs grew up jet-setting across the North American continent. Between her hometown of Oaxaca, Mexico (where she learned traditional drinking songs in the local cantinas), Los Angeles (where her father worked as a film-maker), and Minneapolis (where she studied classical music performance at the University of Minnesota), Downs nurtured the roots of what would become her personal musical style. When it all got to be a bit much, she dropped out of school to follow the Grateful Dead, getting by selling jewelry and living on the street.

After finally finishing her degree in classical voice, Lila returned to the clubs of Oaxaca, where she sang her heart out, performing traditional and original ranchera music. After three hit albums in Mexico, Downs was asked to act and sing alongside Salma Hayek in the 2002 movie Frida. With the release of her latest album and a hotly anticipated tour beginning September 13, Downs checked in with Venus to talk about breaking musical ground as a multi-national woman.

It’s been a few years since Frida, which was a pivotal moment in your career. How has Frida Kahlo made an impact on your work and your life?

Visually, her influence has been very strong because I am also a “half breed,” as they used to say in the Midwest. I don’t look at it as a negative thing anymore, but rather as something very positive in my life and something to be very proud of. I think that she helped me to come to terms with that, as well as my sexuality. She is somewhat of an androgynous individual who read something in the future. She was doing stuff early on that now we can really relate to: this, kind of, obsession with the self and individualism.

Let’s talk about your college years in Minnesota. You attended school there, but you dropped out. What sparked this?

I was studying to be an opera singer, and I think it was when I was a junior that I decided I needed to sort out my own ethnic background, which I had been in denial about up to that point. For me, it had always been about denying the Mexican and the native because I got these reactions that I wasn’t happy about. People wanted to avoid the subject.

Did you ever get a chance to perform your own music when you were in school?

As a performance major, I was doing recitals and the usual things you have to do. Then when I dropped out, I hung out with a hippie band and we used to do covers and once in a while I’d break out in a ranchera song with my geetar… but I really didn’t have a clear sense of direction. I was writing, but I wasn’t really performing my thoughts until much later when I started taking it more seriously.

I became familiar with this great singer, Mercedes Sosa (whom I have the fortune to have collaborated with on one of our songs for this most recent album). Up to that point, I only had influences of songs that had to do with love and waiting and all this stuff that I couldn’t relate to. So when I heard Mercedes singing about ideals, and revolution, and change, and making up your mind, I thought, wow, you can empower yourself through your voice. And that’s the direction I started to take.

Since we’re discussing some of your early influences, I know that you’ve also cited the stories of immigrants, as well as a diverse range of musical traditions from ranchera to American blues and jazz as influences. Were there any new influences that you explored on this album?

Oh, definitely the Afro-Caribbean singers like Celia Cruz, and a lot of music from the South, like Second Line, which is this [musical] form that originated in New Orleans, Louisiana.

You have several collaborators on this album and that was something new for you. How does it feel to be sharing your album with these other musicians?

It’s a real lesson for me, because I am one of those cynical people who sees the collaborations on albums and thinks it’s just another label — a resource to make a lot of money. So I’m surprised that I was so honored and humbled by the experience. To collaborate with the guys, too [Raúl Midon, Gilberto Gutierrez, and Enrique Bunbury], is always a lesson. Being a musician on the road, you are mostly in a man’s world and so it’s always a struggle to try and figure out a way that you can be strong and also be respectful. That was a challenge.