Perla Batalla

Batalla was born in 1964, to an Argentinian mother, Barbara, and a Mexican father, Jorge. Her mother was a singer and her father was a mariachi musician. Her parents ran a record store called "Discoteca Batalla" in Los Angeles in the 1970s. Two years after graduating from High School, Batalla was granted a scholarship to attend the Lee Strasberg Theatre Institute.[1][2] Batalla told an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times in 2001 that she had been attending law school but took a friend's advice to follow a career in music instead. She was introduced to Leonard Cohen by her friend Julie Christensen, when Cohen was auditioning for backup singers. Batalla saud that meeting Cohen was her "big break and the opening of everything".[3]

From 1988, she toured as a backup singer with Cohen, who encouraged her to write her own songs.[1][2]

Batalla released her debut album, Perla Batalla, on August 2, 1994, on the Warner/Discovery label.[1][4] The album included songs written by Batalla, and covers, including "Sixteen Tons" and songs by Cohen and Van Morrison. A review in Billboard called it an "impassioned, at times sublime debut" and opined that although Batalla had "a tendency to lapse into one-dimensional writing, she makes up for this shortcoming on [some] profound originals".[5]

Batalla founded her own music label, Mechuda Music.[1] Like many original artists, Batalla opted to go independent early on, releasing her second album, Mestiza (meaning of mixed blood) on her own label. Heaven and Earth followed. Both CDs were co-written with David Batteau. Amazon named Mestiza Best Independent Release of the year.[6][2] Shortly after the release of Heaven and Earth, a review of a live performnce by Batalla by Ernesto Lechner in the Los Angeles Times compared her to Joni Mitchell and Joan Baez, and suggested that she had been influenced by Fleetwood Mac's album Rumours. Lechner praised Batalla's performance, writing that her "music caresses with its harmonies and gentle rhythms, then draws you in with an unexpected chorus or an unusual melodic resolution", and describing her as "a born storyteller with a rambunctious sense of humor".[7]

Batalla's albumDiscoteca Batalla was recorded in 2002 as an homage to her parents' record shop of the same name. Discoteca Batalla is a compilation of new compositions interspersed with treatments of traditional Spanish language classics arranged to reflect Perla's bi-cultural personal and musical heritage. In 2004 Batalla was invited by The Kennedy Center to perform songs from the album as artist in residence.[8]

Batalla's 2007 tribute album to Cohen, titled Bird on the Wire was nominated for a Grammy Award. Sing Out magazine's Michael Tearson wrote: "Beautifully conceived and executed, Bird on the Wire is a rewarding listening experience I find myself returning to frequently. It is every bit the equal of Jennifer Warnes' classic Cohen tribute album 'Famous Blue Raincoat'. For those uninitiated to the glories of the songs of Leonard Cohen this is a wonderful introduction. For the rest of us it is simply heavenly."[9]

Her next release, Gracias a la Vida (2008), was an anthology of traditional South American songs inspired by a trip to meet her Argentine family. In 2010, Batalla released a first collection of favored holiday songs titled We Three Kings. It was chosen as KCRW's top tune for Christmas.)[10] Tracks on the album included "Love is Everything", "The Nearness of You", "The Very Thought of You" and "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square".

In 2011 she was commissioned by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to compose and perform an original composition to celebrate the opening of "The Adventures of Women Surrealists in Mexico and the U.S." Batalla and her songwriting partner Batteau worked on building this into a full-length theatrical concert called "Blue House".[11] This original song cycle is inspired by the frescos, canvasses and private journals of two of the most important Mexican painters of the twentieth century, Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo.

Batalla made a concert film appearance in Hal Wilner's Cohen tribute, Leonard Cohen: I'm Your Man, which featured a cast that included Rufus Wainwright, Nick Cave, Beth Orton, Antony, and Teddy and Linda Thompson. The Spanish film "Acordes con Leonard Cohen" had Perla sharing the stage in Barcelona with Jackson Browne and John Cale. Batalla has worked on the other side of the camera as well, arranging and musical directing comedic vocal scenes for Will Ferrell's Step Brothers.[12] Batalla has also been a vocal coach for Jeremy Piven of HBO's Entourage.[13]