Still hanging on Leila Lopez's wall is the miniature guitar her parents gave her when she was 8 years old.
They bought it in Nogales, knowing how much she loved listening to her father, Jamie, play his full-size guitar every night.
She has since become one of the most prominent names in local music and said her need to be a musician is a calling so strong it's beyond her control.
"I don't really have a choice," she said.
While Lopez, 27, performs tirelessly around town and tours the West Coast at least once a year, she remains close to her parents — literally. She lives in a guesthouse behind the family home where she grew up.
It's in the small abode — filled with guitars, a drum set, bass, bongos, microphones, a cardboard makeshift sound partition and skateboards — where she writes and records her folksy, acoustic songs.
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"It's like a kid in a toy store," she said of her home just off North Fourth Avenue.
Lopez prefers recording in the middle of the night or on the weekends, when the rest of the world is either asleep or relaxing. She counts influences from Bob Dylan to Gipsy Kings, Led Zeppelin to Joni Mitchell.
She has a bittersweet, breathy voice that delivers honest, intimate lyrics on top of her guitar style that can skip from Latin picking to poppy chords.
"She's one of the better guitar players in town," said Kris Kerry, who books concerts at Plush nightclub.
Lopez began writing songs on her guitar when she was attending Mansfeld Middle School and played in some rock bands during her days at Tucson High Magnet School.
By the time she reached her early 20s, she had recorded some of her own songs. A friend passed those songs to a writer in town, a newspaper article followed, and before she knew it, Lopez was getting gig offers.
"I just didn't know what to do with myself," she said. "I felt like a wreck."
She's since built up her onstage confidence and performs a couple times a month at venues like Plush and Javalinas .
Her shows are about evenly split between solo performances and those with a band that includes Tucson singer-songwriter Courtney Robbins.
Lopez wrote all the music and played the instruments on her self-released 2006 album "The Roots and the Crops."
Outside of music, she's worked at a preschool for the past seven years. She's also been a frequent judge in the Arizona Daily Star's Battle of the Bands and is planning to release a new album next year.
For a free download of Leila Lopez's song "Tonight," go to AzNightbuzz.com
Leila Lopez
Next show: Friday at Green Fire Music, 3445 N. Dodge Blvd. Show begins at 7:30 p.m. and is $5 .
Taste of her lyrics:
Every little garden that I will ever see
Will unearth a part of you in me
And all of the little stories that we write justly to
They are the roots and the crops that we must navigate through
—from "Every Garden"
