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Lisa Morales is set to release her new album, Sonora on September 13th on Luna Records. Off that new album is her single Have It All which was co-written with collaborator and bassist JoJo Garza of Los Lonely Boys, The song brings attention to homelessness. Morales comments,

I found myself lying awake at night, thinking about how homelessness is so out of control. I started talking about how much I hated all the homelessness across the country and started singing ‘Mira el Mundo’ to his melody.”

More about the song

With a storied performance history and a deep catalog spanning rock, country, folk, and Americana, the collaboration was easy to navigate. “Jojo and I are good friends and greatly respect one another musically—so it was easy to write together,” she explains. “Jojo came with the intro guitar riff and part of the melody— and we just took off from there.”

“It was a riff idea I had created not long before the session, ” Jojo adds. “It was not a coincidence that I’d be writing with Lisa the following week…I feel like it was meant for her. Being at Sonic Ranch and working on it together was the perfect setting for it all to come together, and when you listen to it, it’s clear that it’s a song that represents who she is musically. Lisa is a special and unique person, and it’s a very cool tune!”

You can check out the new song here with the video:

About the album

The Lisa Morales you hear on Sonora is decades removed from the precocious niñita who was not yet in grade school, who used to sing mariachi songs with her sister Roberta at Mexican restaurants when they were growing up in Tucson, Arizona, culminating in their critically acclaimed albums as The Sisters Morales.

“My sister and I sang in Spanish before we sang English,” Morales says of the Mexican music that sound-tracked and informed her life “from being a toddler on up” — up, in fact, to the present day. Lisa and Roberta Morales sang that music not just at restaurants at their father’s behest but at every family gathering (“practically bi-weekly,” she laughs), together with their parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, and cousins by the dozens. And on the rare occasions when they weren’t singing themselves, they still marinated in the music daily, from the beautiful boleros on the family turntable to endless hours of Sonoran rancheras (“Mexican country music,” as Lisa calls it) on the radio. Of course, there was plenty of non-Spanish music in that formative air, too; an older brother had a rock band, and one of her many cousins just happened to be Linda Ronstadt.

“All of that Mexican music, it’s the fiber of who I am,” says Morales, And though a lot of her original music — both from the years she spent building an international following with Roberta as the acclaimed duo Sisters Morales and throughout the solo career she officially launched in 2011 — has been in English, Lisa has long maintained that “everything just comes from a deeper place when I’m singing in Spanish.” Fans of Sisters Morales seemed to concur, with 2002’s all-Spanish Para Gloria **being one of the duo’s most popular albums. But it wasn’t until her second solo album, 2018’s Luna Negra and the Daughter of the Sun, that the muse first moved her to explore the untapped wellspring of a third tongue she’d been fluent in her entire life but had never consciously incorporated into her songwriting: Spanglish.

Lisa’s beloved sister, her all-time favorite bandmate and harmony singer since childhood, Roberta, died of cancer in August of 2021. At the time of Roberta’s passing, Lisa’s 2022 record, She Ought to Be King, had already been “in the can” for several months — making Sonora her first full-album project written and recorded in a world without her best friend just a phone call away. Although Roberta’s memory would profoundly influence her every step of the way, Lisa insisted that Sonora was decidedly not conceived as a grieving album. “The songs all came out unconsciously, like an eruption. It was a total purge, which I needed.”