Interview: Luna Sol on writing between three languages

Luna Sol writes between English, Spanish and Portuguese — sometimes inside the same verse. Her second record made that a method rather than an accident.

“I stopped translating,” she says of the writing process. “If the line arrives in Spanish it stays in Spanish. The moment I try to make it work in English for someone else, it stops being the thing I meant.”

The record was built around percussion first, with Colombian folk phrasing and West African drum patterns tracked before most of the melodies existed. She describes the arrangements as “conversations between two sets of grandparents.”

She is direct about the industry context. Early support came from outside Canada, and the domestic interest that followed was, in her telling, a response to that rather than a discovery of its own.

On identity she resists the framing entirely: the point is not representing a hyphenated category but writing accurately about a life lived in three languages, in a city where that is ordinary.

Her plans are modest and specific — a run of shows on the independent Spanish-language circuit, a collaboration with a Montreal producer, and no interest in narrowing the sound to make it easier to describe.