ou meet Rora Wilde in the middle of a Los Angeles afternoon, and she still sounds surprised to be here. She talks about the Rio Grande Valley like a planet she left yesterday. She talks about jazz clubs, Amy Winehouse rarities on vinyl, and the way a valley kid carries wonder into every room. Then she talks about VIXEN, the debut album that finally caught up with the person she became while she was writing it.
VIXEN arrived on October 10 as a full-length record produced with multi-platinum Grammy-nominated producer Jake Magness, whose credits include Machine Gun Kelly, Travis Barker, Halsey, and Trippie Redd. The album moves through bedroom pop, borderland soul, and slow-burn R&B. It also carries the weight of a girl who grew up on the border, learned to play cello as if her life depended on it, and then tried to figure out who she wanted to be once she stepped on stage alone.
Wilde grew up in McAllen, at the southern edge of Texas, where the Rio Grande Valley almost slides into Mexico. Her mother came from Reynosa. Her father grew up in the United States. They met in McAllen and stayed.
“It was just, it’s just so different,” she says about the Valley. “I think everybody from my hometown would agree with that.”
In a quote she repeats often, she calls it “a bubble.” She remembers that “there was no new information coming in.” She adds, “We got songs late. We got fashion late. We got news late. We got everything late.”
That isolation created its own tempo. When Wilde talks about home, she talks about the way people still feel amazed when anyone starts a project. A gig. A record. A tour. “Where I’m from, you know, if you’re, you know, doing a show or if you’re doing like, you know, doing a project, it’s like, oh my gosh, that’s amazing,” she says.
Later, she realised how different that felt from Los Angeles. “Out here, everybody’s got a project, everybody’s got a thing,” she says. “Everybody has shit. Everybody here has a song.”
The bubble also came with its own rules about language and identity. Wilde’s mother tried to raise her with both Spanish and English. Classrooms in the Valley made a different demand. She remembers teachers who insisted kids repeat everything “again in English” and adults who feared that accents would cost their children jobs.
“I’m a part of the no sabo kids,” she says, using the phrase for children of immigrants who grow up with broken or discouraged Spanish. She says she understands the language and can speak some of it, yet she carries the discomfort of those school years. “I’m very proud of where I come from and I love my heritage and everything,” she says. “I don’t want to identify myself with a community that wouldn’t accept me, if that makes sense.”
Wilde does not remember a time before music. “I don’t think I remember a time when I was not performing, not making music,” she says. There is a family video that proves the point. She stands in a trailer kitchen, four years old, shooting a music video with her mother.
Her father played guitar. He tried to pass the instrument on to Wilde and her brother. “He taught me and my brother guitar, more so my brother,” she says. She remembers sitting in on her brother’s lessons after she “ended up spotting on their guitar lessons ’cause I was kind of kicked out of the boys club.” She finished the job herself and taught her own hands how to move.
School opened a different door. Wilde picked up the cello in middle school and stayed with it for years. “I’m a classically trained cellist,” she says. “I was first chair, no big deal.” She laughs, then adds that she “used to get ones on all of my solos” in competitions. She joined chamber groups, played events outside school, and even remembers performing at the airport.
“It was like, you know, all I had was my cello for a little bit,” she says. “I was very, very into it.”
The stage became home. Wilde did theatre. She sang. She learned what it felt like to treat “being on stage, being an entertainer” as “priority number one.”
By her teens, she was already inside studios in the Valley. “I was in the studio by 14, 15,” she says. She recorded with producer Charlie Villa, who later made a documentary about the punk and hardcore history of the Rio Grande Valley.
Wilde remembers opening shows for local metal bands. She describes herself as “the anomaly, like doing pop music in a place where everybody had a hardcore band.”
VIXEN did not appear overnight. Wilde spent years grinding through Austin’s dive bar circuit before she moved to Los Angeles in 2020. Those eight years in Austin turned her into “a live powerhouse” who now leads a five-piece band that bends genres across heartbreak, protest, sex, and survival.
By the time she sat down to write VIXEN, she wanted to move past straight heartbreak songs. “I’ve written so much from the place of heartbreak and from, you know, oh, this happened to me or this person, this, that, and everything,” she says. Therapy helped her look at situations from the other side. She began to imagine songs from the perspective of the person who hurt her.
“I just was writing all of these different experiences I had and writing from their perspective,” she says. She sketched motifs and hooks in her apartment two summers ago. Some songs arrived fully formed. Wilde keeps a voice memo for “Not Your Girl” where she says, it sounds “exactly the way it does on the record, plus all the strings.” Others began as a capella lines that her producers later wrapped in drums and bass.
Throughout the process, she tried to understand what kind of woman sat inside these songs. “I guess I’ve reclaimed a person that I really got to know while I was writing it,” she says. “I guess I reclaimed her even though I’m not sure I ever really discovered her. I kind of met myself through this album, if that makes sense.”
The theme that runs through VIXEN is confidence. Wilde talks about years of constructive criticism from family, bandmates, acting coaches, and industry people who told her how to stand, move, and deliver a line. “I’m used to being told,” she says. “I, I’m good at seeking direction.” The album comes from a different place. She wanted to write from a woman who knows what she wants.
VIXEN is a record that “fuses slow burn R&B, soul, jazz-influenced textures, and electric bedroom pop into something singular.” The ingredients come straight out of Wilde’s childhood and her current obsessions.
Her parents raised her on Sixties and Seventies records. Wilde remembers Simon and Garfunkel and “a whole bunch of hippie shit,” as she puts it. The Beatles played on repeat. So did the Bee Gees and Earth, Wind and Fire. “That groovy stuff really, really inspired me,” she says.
The older she got, the further back she went. She fell in love with jazz. She calls herself “a huge Amy Winehouse head” and says the comparison to Winehouse’s songwriting and phrasing makes sense. During the VIXEN writing sessions, she listened constantly to an Amy Winehouse rarities vinyl, a compilation of live performances that captured what she calls “some sort of like air” around the songs.
“I love listening to live records ‘cause I’m very much like I love live music and performing live,” she says. “She has so many different versions of every song that she has.” Wilde picks precise favourites. “Take the Box,” live at Glastonbury, sits at the top. “It’s a completely different song as the one on the record,” she says.
She also returns to Billie Holiday and Julie London. She calls Holiday “one of my favorites.” She names London’s “Live at the Americana” as a touchstone and says London “was the Lana of that time.” The thing she loves most about London is the way she turned standards into something personal. “She brought such individuality to them,” Wilde says. “She does every standard the best.”
Jazz clubs feel like church. Wilde goes alone, orders a drink, and watches musicians build songs in real time. “It’s never the same every time,” she says. “You can just like listen and watch life happen on stage.” She loves the way new players drop in and change the chemistry. For her, that spirit connects directly to how she wants to move through the world.
“I think that’s kind of what jazz is all about,” she says. “He’s bringing his talent, his approach to whatever is on happening on stage. And I think I’m like that as a person.”
People in Los Angeles often ask Wilde where she is from. She answers “the Valley.” They think she means the San Fernando Valley. She has to explain that she means the Rio Grande Valley. Then the conversation turns to heritage.
Wilde’s mother is Mexican. Her father is white and grew up in the United States. Wilde grew up inches from the border with Mexico. She hears the questions that come with that mix. “So what are you, by the way?” people ask. “Like, you’re like ethnically ambiguous.”
“Am I?” she responds. “I don’t think so.”
She feels the contradiction. She has relatives and neighbours who tell her that being half white makes her güera and makes her entrance into Latino identity conditional. At the same time, she cannot imagine disowning the culture that raised her. “God forbid I walked this earth never admitting my heritage,” she says.
The industry also pushes for categories. Her own press materials describe her as a “Tejano daughter of the Rio Grande Valley” and “a torchbearer for the next wave of Latinx artists redefining what the American pop canon looks and sounds like through the lens of South Texas.” Publicists and editors need the shorthand. Wilde understands that. She also wants space for the person who stands behind it.
“I want to be able to, you know, say, oh yeah,” she says about her Latina identity. “But you know, I think I still hear the kids growing up. It’s like, ‘you’re güera,’ like, it doesn’t even count.”
For now, she lets the songs speak. VIXEN does not include Spanish lyrics. It does carry a sensibility shaped by a childhood of old boleros in the kitchen, parents who work in agriculture, and a Valley that lives with a constant flow of Mexican music and slang. When people call her Latina, she hears her mother and the streets she grew up on. When they try to box her work into Latin pop, she hears the jazz chords, the Amy Winehouse phrasing, and the Bee Gees harmonies that built her ear.
Wilde has been on stage for most of her life. A proper tour still feels like a dream. That may change soon. She says her team plans to book a West Coast run from January through March. The idea, she explains, is a late winter tour that moves through Portland, Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and some cities in Arizona.
“I’ve never gone on a tour,” she says. “But I played, I’ve been playing forever.”
VIXEN will keep growing in the meantime. Wilde says she has a new single lined up for the start of the year. She and her team also talk about a deluxe edition of the album. She has songs that did not make the cut and ideas she wants to finish. “We might do either that or just like another series of, or just another album,” she says. “I’m just always writing and always creating.”
She continues to build visuals around the record. She recently released the “VIXEN” short film on YouTube and says more lyric videos and clips are on the way. She plans her first West Coast tour to promote VIXEN in the fall, with dates to be announced.
When she thinks about the girl who started making music videos in a trailer kitchen and the woman who now stands in front of a five-piece band, Wilde circles back to the same feeling: gratitude that she found this life. Awe that she gets to keep living it.
“Being on stage, being an entertainer, priority number one,” she says. She pauses, then smiles. “This is my life. I’ve never had a different one.”
