Perla Batalla

Grammy nominated vocalist, composer and arranger Perla Batalla was born in Los Angeles, CA. Her father was a musician and her mother ran a popular record store Discoteca Batalla, which catered to the Spanish speaking neighborhoods of the westside. She first gained international attention as a backup singer for Leonard Cohen. In 1994 the legendary Jac Holzman signed Perla to her first major deal on the Warner/Discovery label. Being the rebel she is, in the year 1999 Perla started her own label and won "Best Indie Release of the Year" from Amazon.com for her "Mestiza" song cycle she wrote with David Batteau. Soon after..... blah,blah, blah, blah.... to this day Perla tours regularly around the world singing songs she loves with great musicians...her best days are spent hanging out with people she adores (like husband Claud Mann and genius daughter Eva), eating great food, and drinking good red wine.



I had the pleasure of meeting Perla by chance in 1998 while showing the first guitar to leave my shop.  (I finally got the guts up to take a guitar out to the neighborhood music store to see what someone thought of it, it was no.6)  While the guys were passing around the guitar and playing it, this beautiful young woman walked by, she stopped, turned around, and said, "that is a beautiful sounding guitar". She then invited us all to her concert that evening that happened to be only two blocks from where I lived, so I went. I was blown away!!! She was amazing , I was mesmerized by the beauty and power of her voice. And her compositions were spellbinding. After the show I went and talk to her and her husband Claud Mann (an incredible talent in his own right). The next day I was building No. 7 for Perla, the first guitar I ever sold!
Fast forward to 2007. After attending the Healdsburg Guitar Festival we headed out for Ojai CA to deliver a new guitar (No. 68) to Perla.