Luísa Sonza, without ego to gain fame outside of Brazil
The singer is very popular in her country and now wants to conquer the United States public.
In Brazil, Luísa Sonza is a luminary who can easily gather one hundred thousand people at one of her concerts.
Outside of her country, the story of this 26-year-old singer is different. But first, it's not something she's worried about, and second, her fortunes may change starting this month, when she begins her first tour outside of Brazil, titled "Escándalo Íntimo." "I didn't think the first tour was going to sell out so quickly," Luísa said in a conversation from Los Angeles, the city where she performed her first show in the United States this week. "Nobody thought it would be like this." In Los Angeles, organizers have set a second date for this Saturday at the Echoplex because the first concert sold out in a matter of hours. The same thing happened in Boston and Miami. The New York show at Irving Plaza on June 19th is already sold out.
Almost all of these shows are in small theaters that only fit a few hundred people, but that doesn't bother Luísa because the response from fans has been better than she and her team imagined.
The artist will be performing songs from “Escândalo Íntimo,” an album she recorded in Los Angeles and released in 2023. This will be the end of her promotion for the album because after finishing her six-city tour in the United States—the last stop is June 21st—she will return to Brazil to work on her next album.
Meanwhile, she's savoring the surprise this country gave her, especially since Luísa has sung almost exclusively in Portuguese during her eight-year career. In “Escândalo Íntimo,” she did some mixes with a bit of English and includes a song in Spanish.
Of course, her shows in the country will be more intimate and with more physical proximity to her audience, something that is impossible to do when singing in Brazil in front of thousands and thousands of people.
“I'm used to audiences of 100,000 people and I easily did great things [in Brazil],” she said. “But it's very important for me to have this courage [because] it's like starting over […],"But it's cool because I don't have the pressure I had when I started; now I'm just starting out, but I'm already very successful, I have a career, I'm confident in myself. I feel like I don't have to prove anything to anyone."
Indeed, Luísa's career is full of success. On Instagram alone, she has more than 30 million followers, and on Spotify, her music has surpassed 5 billion streams. She has been nominated for a Latin Grammy three times.
"It's not a problem for me to sing in a small venue because I have a very big career in Brazil," she said. "I don't have that ego; I’m going to be able to sing for the people closest to me, and I need to do that, to experience things more calmly.”
Luísa sees this beginning without the fear she had when she began her career, “without the pressure I had at 17, when I didn’t understand anything about life.”
“Now I’ve lived and I’m stronger, and I also believe that I’m going to live the process well,” she said.