New music from previously featured Lhasa de Sela: Video, "Rising"
Lhasa de Sela - Rising (2009)
YouTube

Image: HERE
Some might have seen Lhasa’s first album, “La Llorona”, as a curiosity, an exotic accident. The singer and songwriter appeared from nowhere in 1997 with an album that defied definition, capturing a Latin world of her own imagination born of an itinerant childhood spent between Mexico and the US. The music was both familiar and truly unique, a mix of ranchera music, Eastern European gypsy music, country, and popular songwriting, with intensely personal lyrics in Spanish, and a passionate vocal delivery. The album was written and produced in Montréal, and in many ways could not have been made anywhere else. These are songs inspired by a warm country but written in a cold one, with a Brontë-like romanticism, a wry and literate sense of humor, and moments of startling emotional rawness.
When they heard it, people from North America and Europe sighed and said “Ah, Mexico...”, and Mexicans said, “What strange music! Where is she from?”
The album made its way through Canada, France, then through half of the world, winning prizes (including a Juno and a Felix) and selling more than half a million copies (a surprising accomplishment for a non-commercial, non-traditional Spanish-language album). “La Llorona” was so thoroughly embraced by its fans that it has become a modern classic of sorts, always under the radar, always being discovered by new admirers, always as surprising and familiar as it was when it first appeared 12 years ago.
But Lhasa was just getting started.
More from her site: HERE
| The Living Road | 1 May 2004 | ||
How a campervan childhood influenced Lhasa's music Lhasa de Sela is a young chanteuse with a bright future drawing on an usual past. She tells Martha how her itinerant childhood influenced her musical style. Lhasa was brought up in the family campervan travelling backwards and forwards along the Mexican/US border. These days she enjoys a strong reputation in France and also in Canada where she now lives. What makes her new album original is that she draws not only on her experience of the road but also of her colloquial use of knowledge of Spanish, French and English. The Living Road, Lhasa on the Wsm label BBC Music: The Living Road |
HERE



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