Her Way: How an Obscure Mariachi Singer Went from Quinceañeras, to the World Series, to Kendrick Lamar

Deyra Barrera was playing birthday parties and restaurants and funerals in Los Angeles when she got the call: Kendrick Lamar wanted her to sing on his new album, GNX. And now, if we’re lucky, she might be a guest at the Super Bowl 59 halftime show. But today, we find out why there is no better soundtrack for her rise — from a tiny town in Mexico to the World Series, with the Dodgers — than the musical genre she’s mastered: mariachi. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Pablo Torre?

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• 3:09Pablo Torre?

  Right after this ad.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  You're listening to Dr. King's Network.

• 3:28Speaker 03

  Hold on, let me, let me close the door.

• 3:31Pablo Torre?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 3:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 3:33Pablo Torre?

  This is really cool for me to have you on the show, Dara Barrera, because, you know, I've been walking around, I live in New York City. And I've been walking around, listening to your music for a couple of weeks now. You've been the soundtrack to my everyday life.

• 3:47Speaker 03

  Thank you for the invite, and thank you for having me in your podcast. I'm very happy and nervous because, like, I've been telling everybody my English, like Celia Cruz used to say, my English no, not very good looking.

• 4:04Speaker 03

  So I'm gonna try to do my best.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  And well, I'm happy to be here.

• 4:10Pablo Torre?

  Your English is beautiful so far.

• 4:13Speaker 03

  I've been practicing.

• 4:15Pablo Torre?

  It speaks, though, to how crazy I imagine your life must have been since, since November.

• 4:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. I don't know if you can see my under eyes black.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  I haven't slept well since November 22nd, when the NX album came out. It's been crazy for me. It's been like, oh, my God, I didn't.

• 4:42Speaker 03

  Imagine this impact.

• 4:44Pablo Torre?

  Dara, you turn on Kendrick Lamar's new album, and the first voice you hear is not Kendrick Lamar, it's you.

• 5:18Speaker 03

  Thank you, Kendrick. Thank you, God, for this opportunity.

• 5:22Pablo Torre?

  How do you describe what you were doing before that album?

• 5:26Speaker 03

  I've been doing a lot of things, rally shows, working a lot, recording my music, my CDs. It's been like up and down, up and down, and it's been very difficult to me. But I never give up. I never give up because this is my passion to sing. That's what I do to live, singing. Every weekend in weddings, quinceañeras, private parties, birthdays, funerals. And I do it with all my heart because I love my work. I love my job. Because I love to sing. I love to transmit that happiness or sadness.

• 6:07Speaker 03

  And always looking for an opportunity to do something more big in my career. After this GNX album, it's happening.

• 6:19Pablo Torre?

  How has the quinceañera business been since you debuted on GNX?

• 6:26Speaker 03

  The other day, I went to a quinceañera to play, and the quinceañera was, "Oh, my God, she's the one to sing with Kendrick Lamar, and she's on the quinceañera." The young people, the quinceañeras, they were like all over me. "Can I take a picture with you? Can I take a picture? Can you sing first? Can you sing the part with Kendrick Lamar?" Okay, I'm mariachi, and I'm starting like, "Siento aquí tu presencia." And they're like, "Oh, my God." It's crazy.

• 6:58Pablo Torre?

  It's something that makes me wonder how Kendrick Lamar discovered you in the first place.

• 7:05Speaker 03

  I was singing for a Fernando Valenzuela tribute at a World Series first game in Toyota Stadium.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  They contacted me after that and they told me to sing my style. I went, I sang, and the rest is historia.

• 7:50Pablo Torre?

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• 11:28Pablo Torre?

  You know, when I told Deira Barrera, today's guest, that I'd been listening to her music while walking all around New York City at the top of the show,

• 11:37Pablo Torre?

  I wasn't referring to her music with Kendrick Lamar on TNX. What I was referring to was her earlier catalog, the kind of stuff that you're hearing underneath me right now, which I'd only discovered because Kendrick, who was about to play the halftime show at Super Bowl 59, in case you hadn't heard, had somehow discovered her.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  Mariachi music is our culture from Mexico. It's trumpets, violins, guitars, bass player, the big guitarón. Mix all together, all kind of rhythms, happy songs, sad songs.

• 12:21Pablo Torre?

  Deira Barrera, like Kendrick, lives and breathes and embodies the city of Los Angeles, which is a city on fire in a country where the newly inaugurated president is now threatening mass deportations back to the place that Deira is originally from. And the fact that all of this is happening while Deira is finally enjoying a suddenly prosperous second act in her career, appearing on no less than three separate tracks on the biggest album of the year at age 49, seemed worth finding out about. I had questions for a person that I'd absolutely heard but knew very little about at this point. And it turned out to be a story about sports and family

• 13:05Pablo Torre?

  and this musical genre, which is resonating uniquely, I think, at this moment. Because mariachi can feel like the saddest thing you've ever heard, but also the happiest.

• 13:25Speaker 03

  En mariachi can puede unir cultura together, to put culturas together, no matter if you're, whatever you are, no matter colores, colores, nada. La música del mariachi es universal.

• 13:41Pablo Torre?

  It is a rare thing to have a genre that can be played in the opposite parts of the emotional spectrum.

• 13:49Speaker 03

  We can play everything. We can play everything.

• 13:52Pablo Torre?

  Yes, yes, you can now be on a song reincarnated about Tupac.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  Que reflejan tu mirada, la noche tu y yo.

• 14:08Pablo Torre?

  You can be on the closing track of GNX, Gloria.

• 14:11Speaker 05

  Sentado, Anita y tú.

• 14:20Pablo Torre?

  You can have a co-writing credit on all three songs.

• 14:24Speaker 03

  I've been working since I was very young. Like around 16 years old, I start singing with my mom and my sister. I learned my first lessons with my mom because she used to play guitar. And she showed me how to play guitar and sing. My abuelito, he was a singer too, my mom, my uncles, my tia, everybody, they sing. So when I was very young, little, well, my family is party animal. All weekends, like they bring music and they start singing. So I'm always there with them, hearing my mom sing. And I was like, I want to sing too, I want to sing.

• 15:16Speaker 03

  When I moved from Mexico to here, to Los Angeles, we start singing every weekend in different nightclubs of South L.A. Gain money to pay rent, to pay bills, to eat.

• 15:38Speaker 03

  That's what I do to live.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Since I was a little girl, I was dreaming that someday, something big is going to happen to me.

• 15:52Pablo Torre?

  By the way, I listened to you on La Voz.

• 15:56Speaker 03

  Ah, yes, yes, La Voz México.

• 15:58Pablo Torre?

  Goosebumps.

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Espero que les guste mi voz.

• 16:03Speaker 03

  Y pues aquí estoy. That was during the pandemic, and I was like here at home like a year doing nothing. So I was like, oh my God, I have to do something. I don't want to be home anymore. So I decided to go to La Voz México and I left.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  When I go to reality shows, I don't go to like, I want to have the first place. No, I just go there to enjoy, to learn, to get to know new people.

• 16:49Speaker 03

  I feel so blessed, so happy with this.

• 17:03Pablo Torre?

  But as for why this story is truly a sports story, you should know that the person Dara Barrera was most excited to get to know was the athlete responsible, in his own way, for Kendrick discovering Dara in the first place. A true Los Angeles legend named Fernando Valenzuela.

• 17:42Pablo Torre?

  Fernando Valenzuela was a folk hero in the realist sense. And I need the kids out there to understand this part. Because he was a left-handed pitcher who would kick his leg high into the air and gaze up towards the heavens before throwing a screwball that seemed to defy physics. And maybe that alone would be charming. But the guy also was the first and only player in the history of baseball to win the Rookie of the Year award and the Cy Young Award for Best Pitcher in All of Baseball in the same year, 1981. Which was also, by the way, the same year that he won the World Series with the Dodgers.

• 18:23Pablo Torre?

  And all of it was simply known as Fernando Mania.

• 18:56Pablo Torre?

  Fernando became an icon.

• 19:01Pablo Torre?

  And eventually, in retirement, a radio announcer. Working up in a booth at Dodger Stadium, commenting on the games with his partner in Spanish. But before all of this, and here's the part that was key to Fernando's lore in Southern California. He and his parents, who were farmers, had lived in a town of roughly 500 or so people in Mexico's northwestern state of Sonora, a town called Echovacila. Which one visiting newscaster from a local LA affiliate described this way.

• 19:35Speaker 04

  The Valenzuelas told me they were simple and primitive people as they invited me to their home. Fernando's room was, just like he explained it to me, small, with one bed. That's where he and his five brothers slept. The six sisters all slept in another room. The baseball field was just a hop, skip, and a jump from this house. And while he slept at home, it was on this baseball field he spent most of his time. The field had no backstop. Paper bases, no fences, and tree stumps were used as benches.

• 20:12Pablo Torre?

  And this scene, the scene of this field in this tiny town, was intimately familiar to somebody else, it turns out. A future singer named Deira Cornejo Barrera, who just happened to be born nearby.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  So, my dad used to play baseball too with Fernando's brothers. I remember when I used to live in Sonora still when I was like around eight years, eight years old. And when we knew that Fernando is here in Chihuahua, everybody, "Let's go, let's go if we can see him." And I remember Fernando used to come out in the door and he used to, to throw, to throw balls to us, to all the kids. We were like, like, running like crazy. "Oh, we have a Fernando Alenzuela ball." So it was, I have very, very good memories of that. But I never met Fernando Alenzuela in person

• 21:17Speaker 03

  since like around seven years ago. Seven years ago because another friend that works with Fernando, Pepe Iníquez, they worked together for the La Vez de la Inve, the radio station. He introduced me.

• 21:34Speaker 03

  And one time I met Pepe Iníquez in a birthday party that I went to play, they hired me. So, "Hey, you're Pepe Iníquez, blah, blah, blah." I'm yelling, "Hey, tell Fernando that I'm Deira Cornejo. I know he, he, he knows who's my dad, blah, blah, blah." "Oh, yeah." And he told me, "When you go to Toyota Stadium, call me and come and say hi to us and I'm gonna introduce to Fernando Alenzuela." And yes, he was very serious at first, at first, he was very serious. And I told him, "Oh, my God, I'm, I'm from, I'm from Villajuarez, Sonora. My dad is Antonio Cornejo." "Oh, yeah, I know who is your dad. He, he used to play very good baseball with his brothers."

• 22:18Speaker 03

  So we started to have a friendship, very, very, very nice friendship. And, and he was always telling us jokes, bad jokes, but I have to laugh.

• 22:32Pablo Torre?

  I want to explain Fernando Valenzuela to people who maybe aren't as familiar with baseball. He's somebody that my friend Bill Plaschke, who writes for the LA Times, called the most celebrated Dodger, the most popular Los Angeles Dodger ever, the most impactful Los Angeles Dodger ever.

• 22:49Speaker 03

  And I was there to sing when they retired his number.

• 22:54Pablo Torre?

  Yes, yes. So that was August 11th, 2023. They finally retired the great Fernando Valenzuela's jersey.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  Tonight, we are here to honor, celebrate, and retire the number 34 of Fernando Valenzuela.

• 23:13Pablo Torre?

  How did you get booked for that gig?

• 23:16Speaker 03

  Fernando always go, went to see me at a restaurant that I always play on Sundays. And after he play golf, he get there very early to have breakfast and listen to our music.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  And like joking, like talking always with him joking. I asked him, "Hey, take me to Dodgers. I want to sing there. I want to, I need to sing there because everybody's there, my friends, everybody. And I have to be there too." He always telling me that. He didn't like Mariachi at all. He always telling me, "I don't like Mariachi. I like Banda."

• 24:05Speaker 03

  You know Banda, that the big, that tuba, the very noisy, noisy? He liked that. So when they retired his number, I asked him, "Why you don't bring Banda Recodo? The most famous banda of Sinaloa, Mexico, very famous. Oh, no, because I want you to play. I want you there with your group."

• 24:32Speaker 03

  So one day, he took somebody of the crew of the Dodgers. They called me, "Fernando Valenzuela wants you to sing for the retired number." You were, "Oh, my God, for reals?"

• 24:55Speaker 03

  I was in the newspapers and the noticias, noticieros. Oh, Deira Barrera from Villajuarez Sonora. She was the singer that Fernando asked for to go to sing for his retired number. So I was everywhere. They were talking about me everywhere.

• 25:19Pablo Torre?

  But a little more than a year after that, a year after Fernando Valenzuela's jersey retirement ceremony on October 22, 2024, the headlines across northwestern Mexico and southern California were dominated by a different kind of news.

• 25:39Speaker 05

  A sad night for Dodger fans and for all of baseball. Dodger legend Fernando Valenzuela has died. Team announcing the news tonight, just days away from the Dodgers' return to the World Series against the New York Yankees.

• 25:52Pablo Torre?

  Fernando Valenzuela was just 63 years old when he died of septic shock in Los Angeles, right before the start of one of the most highly anticipated and highly rated World Series in recent baseball memory.

• 26:08Pablo Torre?

  And when it came time for the Dodgers to figure out how to honor the most celebrated, most popular, most impactful player in their franchise's history, before a game that everybody, by the way, in Los Angeles was absolutely gonna watch, team officials orchestrated one moment that was meant to be.

• 26:31Speaker 03

  When Fernando passed, they called me right away to, if I wanted to do the tribute to sing there, and of course, I said yes, not even thinking about, oh, it's the first game of the World Series, Yankees and Dodgers. I didn't think about that. I just think about that I want to sing for my friend.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  And I got there, very emotional, very sad, because it was too fast. I didn't think that he was gonna pass.

• 27:11Pablo Torre?

  To honor Fernando Valenzuela, who is truly one of the most important players in the history of sports in America. Did you know which song you wanted to start with?

• 27:24Speaker 03

  Eh, yes, yes. Yo te extrañaré.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  I was singing there, looking at the cabin when he used to sit to coordinate the game with the Spanish radio station. And I will always go there to say hi. And I was singing and looking, looking the videos and looking up to the cabin and he wasn't there. And it was very like sad for me.

• 28:10Speaker 03

  The people was like screaming his name. When I put my voice very, very high, they were like, oh. My skin were like chills.

• 28:43Speaker 03

  And now he's my angel, he's my angel. And I feel sad because he's not here anymore, but I can feel that he's doing a lot of things for, for us. We, we won, we won, Dodgers. The series, the World Series, yeah?

• 29:05Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, you're in New York, right?

• 29:07Pablo Torre?

  I was gonna say, that was painful for me.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  You're a New York fan.

• 29:10Pablo Torre?

  Painful for me, but now that I understand the backstory, it's hard not to root for you, there. I mean, in some sense, that is a dream also.

• 29:29Pablo Torre?

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• 32:57Pablo Torre?

  Okay, so there is another angle to this completely surreal story that we've been reporting that I cannot help but be curious about, especially from Deira's perspective. Because this part of the story, first of all, is currently moving its way through the court system as we speak, culminating in what should be a historic moment in popular culture at the Super Bowl next month. And also, because- Dara Barrera, a woman who learned how to sing from her mother in this tiny, tiny town in Mexico, has implicitly taken a side in an extraordinarily public and extremely North American type of feud.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  Oh my God, I have new friends now. Kendrick Lamar fans are my friends now.

• 33:45Speaker 05

  A war of words turning into a full-blown feud between two of the biggest names in rap, Kendrick Lamar and Drake.

• 33:54Speaker 05

  The two longtime rivals battling it out in a matter of days, releasing eight new songs, one after the other, with the intensity heating up over the weekend. Drake, you know that brother. He's gone ahead and filed a lawsuit against his own record company, Universal Music Group, for Kendrick Lamar's "Not Like Us." Attorneys for Drake say the song, which is aimed at the Canadian rapper as an example of valuing, quote, "corporate greed over the safety and well-being of its artists," end quote.

• 34:27Pablo Torre?

  And so, yeah, I just wanted to know, in general, had you been following Drake versus Kendrick, all of that before you became a collaborator of Kendrick?

• 34:37Speaker 03

  You know what? I'm not really listening to rap music. I want to be honest. I always listen to mariachi, Mexican music.

• 34:49Pablo Torre?

  And that raised another question for me about the conversation that Dara Barrera had with Kendrick Lamar and his camp when they brought her, a true outsider to the genre, into their famously private studio for the first time.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  I told them, you know what? I don't know how to rap. No, we don't want you here. We don't want you. We want you to do your voice, your voice, your potente voz, your vibrato fuerte.

• 35:21Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Okay?

• 35:22Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 35:23Speaker 03

  I put my headphones there, okay? They put music and I start like singing and singing and singing and singing and that's it.

• 35:31Pablo Torre?

  The beginning of "Whacked Out Murals", which is the first track on this album, of course. Can you translate what the words you're singing there, what they mean?

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Siento aquí tu presencia. I feel your presence here.

• 35:48Speaker 03

  La noche de anoche, last night night.

• 35:52Speaker 03

  Y nos ponemos a llorar.

• 35:56Speaker 03

  And we start crying.

• 35:57Speaker 06

  Yesterday, somebody whacked out my mural.

• 36:02Speaker 03

  I didn't know what it's all about because I just went to record and I never listened to that song. So I was like, okay, what's gonna happen?

• 36:11Pablo Torre?

  It sounds like you were, uh, llorar. It sounds like you were crying too when you heard it.

• 36:17Speaker 03

  I was crying, yes, without knowing what is gonna happen later.

• 36:23Pablo Torre?

  Do you remember when you first realized, when you first learned that in fact you were gonna be the first sound on GNX?

• 36:30Speaker 03

  It was a surprise because I was like, I went to record and then I didn't hear anything. I remember my friend called me and she told me, "Do you hear the new album? You're on it. And not only one song, you're on three songs." Que reflejan tu mirada, la noche tuya. I was in Arizona with my aunt and my mom for our wedding. They don't know about rap music, so they asked me, "Okay, who is this guy? Oh my God, he is the most famous rap singers of the world." And I'm there in his new album.

• 37:10Pablo Torre?

  Part of what I think people are learning though, because of your collaboration with Kendrick, is that mariachi, that Mexico, is such an enormous part of, of course, Los Angeles, which is obvious to every Mexican person or anybody who is actually in Los Angeles. It's 50% Hispanic, Los Angeles.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:29Pablo Torre?

  And yet, and yet people are sort of realizing now, for real, like, wait a minute, Kendrick picked this mariachi singer and now they're realizing the history that you guys share culturally.

• 37:40Speaker 03

  He was bringing it all together, our music together, and music doesn't have any boundaries and... There is no race, there is no color, there is no frontiers, nothing. Rap and mariachi, imagine. That's a beautiful example of how can music can get together all cultures from all the world.

• 38:05Pablo Torre?

  Something that I didn't appreciate, but I was doing a little bit of research about how many songs a good mariachi needs to know. Because it's, again, you play every type of event, happy, sad, celebrations, funerals. So about how many songs would you say you know?

• 38:25Speaker 03

  My friends, they always call me, "Oh my god, Data, you know a lot of songs. You're like a, you know what, procola? When you put money and put music?"

• 38:33Pablo Torre?

  Oh, a jukebox.

• 38:35Speaker 03

  Oh, okay. You're a jukebox, because you know every, every, every song in the world. They ask me for a song, "Oh yeah, I know it, I know it."

• 38:44Pablo Torre?

  You mentioned Salya Cruz before, and I was like, "Okay, so she obviously knows Guantanamo." Of course, that's an easy one.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Oh, yes, yes, yes.

• 38:52Speaker 03

  You want me to sing it?

• 38:54Pablo Torre?

  I would love nothing more, Data, than that specific thing.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  I have my guitar here.

• 39:59Pablo Torre?

  Oh my gosh. It's such a beautiful song. Wait, hold on, hold on, hold on, hold on, I got one more. Do you know any Sinatra? You gotta know some Sinatra.

• 40:08Speaker 03

  Frank Sinatra, yes, "My Way."

• 40:17Speaker 03

  I record that song, "My Way," but Spanish version. Oh, it's one of the songs that makes me cry every time I sing it. Yesterday, somebody asked for that song and I was singing. And looking at my mother, she was there. And like, I started like crying because she has dementia. So, it's very sad to me. Because she's my fan, my number one fan. And she don't know what's going on. But she only knows that she loves to hear me singing. So I was singing it, "My Way," yesterday and I start crying because

• 40:59Speaker 03

  I feel very sad to see my mom there. And she was a singer when she was young. She sings professionally too. And like, she's living the dream with me. The dream that she couldn't do more. And she's living it with me. And I just wanna do a lot of things before she forgets who am I.

• 41:27Speaker 03

  I just wanna do it for her because she always telling me, "You have a lot of talent, mija. You sing beautiful, people love you. I want you to be more like famous and singing everywhere." And I want to do it because before she forgets who am I or, I don't know. I'm sorry, I get very emotional when I talk about my mom's dementia. And he gets me, my heart. So sometimes, I just want like, "Mom, come on, let's sing." Because it's a therapy for her. And she loves to sing, she sings beautiful.

• 42:34Speaker 03

  Music is beautiful because now that she's sick with dementia, she can sing every song and she doesn't forget the lyrics of the songs. And that's a very, very good therapy.

• 42:52Pablo Torre?

  What do you hope for mariachi as a form of music?

• 42:58Speaker 03

  I just wanna take my music all over the world. So with this T and X album of Kendrick Lamar, I think it's gonna be more connecting more people, more people with our music together. So very honored and orgullosa, how do you say, orgullosa?

• 43:19Pablo Torre?

  Proud.

• 43:19Speaker 03

  Proud, proud to be, to that I am a Mexican woman.

• 43:25Pablo Torre?

  Yes.

• 43:26Speaker 03

  In the name, in the name of all my Mexican mariachi friends, women that we've been here working a lot, trying to take our music more up levels. And because we're a woman, it's very different. It's very difficult to be a woman. There's a lot of machismo that sometimes they don't let us do. It's changing, todo está, it's like we're having more opportunities now, more. So in name of all my friends, women, talented women that I know a lot, in name of them, and I feel very proud to have my Mexican flag. And being sonorense mexicana, I just wanna do the best

• 44:10Speaker 03

  so they can, they can feel proud of me too.

• 44:15Pablo Torre?

  I wanna see you play the Super Bowl, Dara. I want you to be there. I want you and Kendrick to be there in New Orleans for the Super Bowl. Can we, we're praying together, this is all we're doing.

• 44:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have this, Mira. I always, every night, I play with Virgencita de Guadalupe. Every night, La Virgen de Guadalupe.

• 44:38Speaker 03

  I always ask God and La Virgencita to do the best for me. Let me do. If I'm gonna be there, I'm gonna be there because then. So I don't know, but I have it in my mind that, okay, anything can happen. Imagine First Woman, Mexican Mariachi, at... Oh. I had this.

• 45:02Pablo Torre?

  Me too. Dara, me too. Me too.

• 45:06Speaker 03

  Gonna be historia.

• 45:08Pablo Torre?

  And I'm pretty sure, Dara, that you're gonna do it your way.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  My way. Ami manera.

• 45:29Pablo Torre?

  All right. So the episode isn't over yet. Thank you for sticking around. And the reason I'm still here is because I wanted you to know that after my conversation with Dara several weeks ago now, her life did turn back to relative normalcy. She was still working every single weekend at quinceañeras and parties and restaurants. But then, the L.A. fires broke out. And they were close enough that Dara could see the flames from her own front door, not far from Altadena. And that night, she told us, felt like a horror movie.

• 46:08Pablo Torre?

  Her home ultimately wound up being okay, thankfully. But her clients, the people who had just been marveling, as we had discussed, at having this woman from the Kendrick Lamar album in front of them, performing privately for them. They weren't all as lucky. And all of them began canceling their parties altogether. Because, of course, of course, they had to do that. Which is how, the other night, Dara found herself at the seafood restaurant where she regularly performs. And a customer approached and asked the human jukebox, that is, Dara Barrera, to sing a song called "Ami manera."

• 46:52Pablo Torre?

  Or, as it's known in English, my way.

• 47:19Pablo Torre?

  And as Dara hit this chorus, and this was just as she told us that she would, she began to cry.

• 47:33Pablo Torre?

  She was thinking about the suddenness of loss, she told us. She was thinking about the fires, about Fernando, about her neighbors, about Los Angeles, about her mother, the woman who had taught her to love music in the first place. And yeah, sadness and happiness. Sadness and happiness. They really can feel like two strings on the same instrument.

• 48:05Pablo Torre?

  And so what Dara Barrera did, all that Dara Barrera could do, there in the corner of that restaurant, is what she hopes to do in front of the entire world, at the Super Bowl, maybe, if we're lucky.

• 48:21Pablo Torre?

  She sang.

• 48:46Pablo Torre?

  This has been Pablo Torre Finds Out, a Meadowlark Media production.

• 48:52Pablo Torre?

  And I'll talk to you next time.

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