Liana Flores blends bossa nova’s radiant warmth with the earnest poetic reflections of folk to create music that flourishes somewhere in the middle. After finding herself at the center of a song gone viral, earning a largely global but altogether new online fanbase, she signed with Verve Records to release her debut Flower of the soul earlier this summer. In a few months, she’ll be performing across the U.S. and Europe, with stops at the Constellation Room in Santa Ana on September 6th and the Troubadour in Los Angeles on September 9th—and you’ll be kicking yourself if you miss it!
Although classically trained from a young age, Flores didn’t venture to write her own songs until she was a teenager, around the same time she also started to learn guitar. It was then that she started to explore the sounds of bossa nova—music she’d been exposed to early on also in her British-Brazilian home—using it as an opportunity to tap into a side of her culture that had been geographically and linguistically inaccessible. It was around this time that Flores also started being more proactive in her discovery of music, quickly becoming enamored with the folk and singer-songwriter heroes of the 1960s and 1970s.
After years of quietly self-producing and uploading her music online, her single “rises the moon” took off on TikTok, its melodic and lyrical allure casting its forlorn spell on listeners. When the fervor refused to subside she decided to set aside her post-college plans to pursue the sudden path that had just opened up for her.
On her first two EPs—The Water’s Fine! (2018) and recently (2019)—Flores reveals the musical and thematic overlappings shared by bossa nova and folk. One, with its vibrantly painted cover, dips and bobs through tranquilizingly warm melodies carried by delicate instrumentals. The other and more recent, as the title so faithfully suggests, leans more pensively toward the kind of melancholic but glowing musings that made that first single go viral.
As charming as those releases were, her debut LP Flower of the soul finds Flores weaving the most organic hybrid of the two genres that comprise her sound to date. Here, she coils lush and lively imagery of nature’s splendor (“Orange-coloured day”) around dreamily elegant instrumentation, plucked strings, and woodwinds swooning and swaying in the golden breeze of her melodies. Lyrics replete with grand and intimate conjurings of romance, loneliness, and growth.
Given the seemingly serendipitous circumstances of her emergence, it’s clear that Flores isn’t taking any of it for granted as she prepares for the next phase: performing with a live band on her upcoming tour. “I’m very grateful to be able to make an album,” she shared in a press release. “I’m not taking for granted how improbable all this is and how lucky I am to be in this position.”
That being said, the more you drift through Flower of the soul the more you start to get a sense of the beguiling idiosyncracies, the little dazzlements of her voice or songwriting, and you start to realize that her viral moment was an inevitable one. Disarmingly beautiful, enchanting beyond belief, this is music not meant to sit hidden in some dark corner of the internet but to resound in the chambers of every heart. Which is exactly the kind of tender vulnerability Flores evokes through her songs.
You can see Liana Flores in concert at the Constellation Room in Santa Ana on September 6th and the Troubadour in Los Angeles on September 9th.
Words: Steven Ward
Visit Liana Flores on her website and Instagram to stay updated on new releases and tour announcements.
Liana Flores Tour
September 6 – Santa Ana, CA – Constellation Room
September 7 – La Jolla, CA – The Loft at UCSD
September 9 – Los Angeles, CA – Troubadour
September 10 – San Francisco, CA – The Independent
September 12 – Portland, OR – The Old Church
September 13 – Vancouver, BC – St James Hall
September 14 – Seattle, WA – Ballard Homestead
September 17 – St Paul, MN – Amsterdam
September 18 – Chicago, IL – Lincoln Hall
September 20 – Toronto, ON – Monarch
September 21 – Montreal, QC – Theatre Fairmount
September 23 – Boston, MA – Cafe 939
September 24 – Brooklyn, NY – Music Hall of Williamsburg
September 26 – Washington, DC – The Atlantis
September 27 – Philadelphia, PA – PhilaMOCA
October 22 – Manchester, England – The Deaf Institute
October 24 – Leeds, England – Brudenell Social Club
October 25 – Glasgow, Scotland – King Tut’s Wah Wah Hut
October 26 – Birmingham, England – O2 Institute 3
October 28 – Bristol, England – The Louisiana
October 29 – Brighton, England – Komedia
October 30 – London, England – Lafayette
November 7 – Cologne, Germany – Yard Club
November 8 – Brussels, Belgium – Botanique
November 10 – Rotterdam, Netherlands – Rotown
November 11 – Hamburg, Germany – Nochtwache
November 12 – Berlin, Germany – Privatclub
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