Mon Laferte, courtesy.

 Like most musicians, Mon Laferte is extremely eager to get back out on the road.

“I’m going crazy,” the Chilean superstar said through a translator. “I’m dying to be back on stages. I want to live in airports. It’s been a long, long time. I miss the experience of being on a stage with a band. They’re my best friends.”

Not helping her craziness is that she’s been spending most of her time in her house in Mexico, she said.

“There aren’t many things going on in Mexico, and the things that are open aren’t socially distanced at all,” she said. “So I’m spending all my time at home. I’m taking advantage of all this time to rehearse for the tour.”

That doesn’t mean Mon Laferte has squandered her time off. She’s already released an album this year, SEIS, which she wrote after being inspired by a documentary on legendary Mexican ranchera singer Chavela Vargas early on during the COVID-19 lockdown and immersing herself in the music of her current home country.

Once that album was done, it was time to move on and experiment with new sounds and new influences for her music. To that end she headed north and spent four months in Los Angeles.

“There’s another album I wrote while I was living in L.A. earlier this year,” she said. “It’s not at all influenced by Mexican folk. I write every album differently, so this album is inspired by Los Angeles and the experience of the lockdown.”

And from there she worked quickly.

“The album is already going through the mastering process,” she said. “I want to release them [the songs] now but I also want to do what the label says and release them as an album. But it’s coming later this year.”

On top of that, she also contributed a cover of “Nothing Else Matters” to The Metallica Blacklist, a charity tribute album for the 30th anniversary of Metallica’s self-titled album, alongside musicians as diverse as Miley Cyrus, Darius Rucker, St. Vincent and Kamasi Washington.

“It was crazy being invited by an amazing band like Metallica to cover one of their songs,” she said. “I asked a friend to translate the lyrics into Spanish and made it a more South American folk song. That’s what I felt I was capable of doing with it. There’s a Chilean guitar player with a solo and a lot of traditional Chilean instruments.”

Once she was asked to join the project, she said it was easy to pick a song from the Metallica album to cover.

“‘Nothing Else Matters’ reminds me of my childhood,” she said. “It was the first song I learned on the guitar. And of all the songs on the album, I like it the best.”

But for now she’s back on the road. Literally in fact; the West Coast leg of her U.S. tour begins in Seattle next week and from there she’s heading to California—via I-5.

“It’s a whole bus tour,” she said. “It’s really exciting. I’m really glad to be back.”

The interview was translated by staff photographer Joaquin Cabello. Follow him at Instagram.com/joaquinxcabello. Follow editor Daniel J. Willis at Twitter.com/BayAreaData.