Juana Molina is an Argentinean songwriter whose fourth album, Son, teems with the lush atmosphere of her home outside Buenos Aires—it is a record touched by the symphonic chatter of birds and insects, which would overtake the songs altogether were it not for the hushed power of Molina’s voice and her delicate production work.

Before she was a singer, Molina was best known in South America for her comic skills on the Antonio Gasalla show and her starring role in the comedy series Juana and Her Sisters. She abandoned the small screen in 1996, determined to write and perform her own music.

This interview took place by phone on April 5, 2006.

—Josh Kun

I. SHAKY HANDS

THE BELIEVER: One of the things everyone likes to talk about regarding your career is that you began as a TV comedian and then went on to be a singer. Was there anything about being a comic working in TV that taught you how to be a singer?

JUANA MOLINA: No, I think they were two totally different careers, because when I was acting, I was always impersonating different people, so it was never me—it was never myself. When I started to sing, I suddenly felt naked. I mean, I knew that was going to happen, because that’s the reason why I couldn’t do it before—when I was a teenager, I just couldn’t play in front of anyone at all—it was impossible, my hands started to shake, my voice was gone, and I was so self-conscious of what people would think about what I was doing. Because I didn’t know how to play songs that anybody knew—all I knew how to play were my own songs, and so I had this feeling of having my own chords and my own things that weren’t—I was afraid of being judged as doing nonsense music. But then maybe what the acting did to me was that I got more courage to do what I really wanted to do, even though I had all these fears that were still inside me.

BLVR: When you hear actors talk about their craft, it’s exactly how you said—it’s about putting a version of oneself out into the public, but it’s never exactly who you are.There’s always some level of performance. And then singers say,“What I’m giving you is the raw me— I’m putting myself out onstage every night.” But—isn’t music also a kind of acting, a kind of performance?

JM: That’s exactly the difference for me. I don’t feel like I am performing when I sing. I think a performance— I might be totally wrong, because I have this understanding of the word performance that might...