Julieta Venegas doesn't perform like someone protecting her legend. At a recent showcase at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, the Tijuana-born, Grammy-winning singer-songwriter moved between a sofa chair, a piano and an accordion, chatting and singing in roughly equal measure — casual, curious, easy to be around. For a songwriter behind albums as beloved as Sí and Limón y Sal, the lack of pretense is the point: she belongs to the kind of artist who pulls you in close rather than performing from a distance.
The Brooklyn appearance framed a conversation about borderlands, creativity and Venegas's biggest recent challenge: writing her first book. For a musician who has been prolific for decades, prose turned out to be a different animal — a process that unsettled her in ways songwriting never has. That tension between the two crafts ran through the discussion, alongside reflections on growing up in Tijuana and how life on a border shapes the way an artist sees everything.
Venegas's connection to Tijuana matters to how she talks about creativity. The city is Mexico's crossroads with the United States — a place where languages, audiences and aesthetics mix daily — and that in-between perspective has long been part of her sound: indie pop built around her accordion and piano, sung in Spanish with an ear tuned to both sides of the line.
For travellers, the interview doubles as a reason to look again at Tijuana itself, a city long reduced to border-crossing stereotypes that has quietly built one of Mexico's most interesting food, beer and art scenes. And for fans, Venegas's story is a reminder of why live shows in intimate rooms like National Sawdust — a 350-seat venue in Williamsburg known for pairing music with unusual programming — can feel so different from arena nights. When an artist talks as much as she sings, the room changes.
Who is this for? Music travellers planning trips around live shows and musicians' hometowns, and anyone curious how place shapes songwriting. Venegas's catalogue — start with Sí (2003) and Limón y Sal (2006) if you somehow haven't — makes a decent soundtrack for a Baja California road trip, too.
Story via Roads & Kingdoms.