La Zorra Zapata Turns a Love Story Into an Album
I love when a creative project begins somewhere unexpected. Not with a marketing plan. Not with a carefully calculated concept. Just with another human being saying, “These songs mean something to us. What would they sound like in your world?”
That is essentially how Peruvian singer-songwriter and producer Nuria Zapata Fiedler, known as La Zorra Zapata, arrived at her new album I Love You Baby.
The seven-track project was released August 12, 2026, through COSMICA Artists + Records. The project began with an unusual commission. A couple shared a collection of songs tied to their relationship and invited Zapata to remake them however she wished. Their personal soundtrack became raw material for her own sonic imagination.
That idea immediately caught my attention because it sits at the intersection of music, memory and culture. Those are the spaces where storytelling becomes most interesting.
La Zorra Zapata Rebuilds Familiar Songs
A covers album can easily become an exercise in imitation. This one is positioned differently.
Zapata describes the freedom of working with songs that were emotionally important to someone else rather than herself. Because she was not protecting her own memories of the originals, she could take them apart and reconstruct them.
That approach is especially clear in her version of “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You.” Working with Delussion Bay, Zapata recasts the familiar song as something far more intimate, replacing much of its grand pop character with airy electronics and stacked vocal textures.
The official video features Karla Bacigalupo, Miss Perú, extending the reinterpretation visually.
You can follow La Zorra Zapata on Instagram, explore her work on Spotify, or watch her work on YouTube.
The Album Moves Across Languages and Generations
The tracklist pulls from different traditions, eras and musical languages.
There are songs associated with Leonard Cohen, Mon Laferte and legendary Peruvian composer Chabuca Granda. The collection also includes “Noche de Bodas,” “Paloma,” “So Long Mary,” “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” “Cardo o Ceniza,” “Amor Completo” and “Échame a Mí la Culpa.”
That range matters.
Rather than treating Latin music as one sound, the project moves across songwriting traditions and emotional registers. It also allows a contemporary Peruvian artist to place internationally familiar material beside Latin American classics.
That kind of musical conversation is one of the reasons I enjoy following artists who refuse easy categorization.
A Peruvian Artist With an Experimental Edge
Zapata occupies a musical space where intimate songwriting meets experimental pop and electronics. Onstage, she builds much of that world herself through guitar, looping and layers of her own voice.
She has released several previous projects, including La Zorra Zapata in 2020, Acantilados in 2022 and Quema o Ilumina in 2024.
She has also opened for artists including Mitski, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Ximena Sariñana. Her international path has included showcase appearances at BIME and Circulart, along with support from Peru’s Ministry of Culture.
That trajectory makes I Love You Baby feel less like an isolated experiment and more like another step in an artistic practice built on intimacy and transformation.
Why Covers Can Become Cultural Translation
There is something fascinating about hearing a familiar song stripped of the choices that made it famous.
A cover can expose the bones of a composition. It can also reveal the personality of the artist doing the reinterpretation.
That process resembles cultural translation. The song may begin in one place, but the new artist brings different references, languages, rhythms and emotional instincts to it.
For a Peruvian artist working across Latin America and Europe, that movement feels especially fitting.
It also connects with the way I think about culture more broadly. Culture is not static. We carry things forward by changing them.
That is part of what makes cultural storytelling so rich. Traditions survive because people keep entering into conversation with them.
A Love Story That Belongs to More Than Two People
The most charming thing about I Love You Baby may still be its origin.
A couple had songs that mattered to them. They handed those songs to another artist. She transformed them. Now listeners around the world can attach entirely new memories to the same music.
That is what songs do so beautifully.
They begin as somebody’s story, then become everybody’s.
For more DG Speaks stories exploring Latin culture, art, food and community, read Beer Barrio: Sabor Latino, Art, and Food and browse more cultural festival coverage.
