NEW YORK, NY.- Montreal’s wide-ranging music scene has been one of its calling cards for decades, with border-crossing success stories like ambitious rock band Arcade Fire, arty electro-pop artist Grimes and renowned post-rock modernists Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Yet one of the musicians most beloved there is the spellbinding Lhasa de Sela, who wrote and sang in English, French and Spanish, but remains largely unknown in the United States.
She was usually referred to simply as Lhasa, and before she died of breast cancer in 2010 at 37, she became a platinum-selling recording artist in Canada, with genre-busting albums that synthesized Romani music, Mexican rancheras, Portuguese fados, Americana, chansons française and South American ballads, marrying them with mystical, romantic and intensely personal lyrics.
In Europe, where Lhasa was a mainstay of the festival circuit, and lived in Marseilles, France, for several years, she became a star on the strength of her intimate performances. But in the United States, where she was born and spent most of her childhood, Lhasa’s multilingual recordings proved too much of a marketing challenge for her American record companies, even after she toured with Sarah McLachlan’s traveling festival, Lilith Fair.
Feist, Calexico, Juana Molina, Silvana Estrada and many other stars will perform in the tribute concerts that will cap this year’s Pop Montreal festival on Sunday and Monday. Their homage underscores an enduring love affair between a city and an artist who made just three otherworldly albums, including a last, self-titled album, all in English, that she hoped would finally establish her in her home country.
Bia Krieger, the Brazilian-born, Montreal-based singer who was a friend of Lhasa’s, said, “Iconic is the right word” to describe her. “There’s a circle of people here that cherish her.”
Lhasa is now even woven into the landscape of her old neighborhood, Mile End, which is anchored at its southern end by a huge mural of the singer created by a local artist, Annie Hamel, and, on the north by Parc Lhasa de Sela, a children’s playground the city erected in her memory.
“She had a belief in the truth of a tiny little sound and could make the audience come closer,” guitarist Brad Barr said of his friend in an interview. “Someone like that doesn’t show up that often. She was a remarkably fun person to be with, a mischievous, transgressive babe who could get excited about having a cigarette inside, yet in conversations, she could go deep.”
Barr was one of many musicians who performed with Lhasa. “You knew she was reaching for something. When you played with Lhasa you couldn’t phone it in,” he said.
An outsider from the start, Lhasa was born in an unused ski cabin in Big Indian, New York, a hamlet west of Woodstock, and grew up with her three sisters in a school bus their parents drove between the United States and Mexico. They were largely home-schooled and had no telephone or television but were encouraged to value curiosity, creativity and consciousness. Her sisters ultimately became circus performers in France.
“They were incapable of having a middle-class life,” Lhasa said of her parents, Alexandra Karam, an American, and Alejandro Sela de Obarrio, who was from Mexico, in a 2004 interview in The Telegraph. “They were the black sheep of their families. They took a lot of hallucinogenic drugs and took incredible risks.”
Her nomadic, hand-to-mouth hippie childhood was by turns unsettling and inspiring. “It’s hard for kids to live with the kind of uprootedness and insecurity we had,” Lhasa told the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. in 2005. “We attached ourselves onto the romance of it. That definitely has served me well.”
As an artist, Lhasa harvested the fruits of her atypical childhood on the road — her family’s free-spirited wanderlust; countless days and nights on the bus spent reading fairy tales; and a traveling soundtrack from her parents’ substantial library of cassettes and albums. Her early musical exposure included Maria Callas, Mexican rancheras by Cuco Sánchez and Chavela Vargas, the work of Latin American political songwriters Victor Jara and Violeta Parra, and jazz, folk and field recordings.
“I grew up with all kinds of music without thinking that any of it was strange or extraordinary,” she told the Canadian newspaper Burnaby Now in 2005. “When I first heard about ‘world music’ I didn’t know what they were talking about. It’s just music to me.”
Those traditions and folk forms would have a deep impact on her own work, which could wax romantic, political or surprisingly dreamlike and metaphysical. A Lhasa album might begin with a love ballad of stark longing, switch to a playful rewrite of a 16th-century children’s Christmas carol from Spain and culminate in startling images of death and transfiguration in a song like “Soon This Place Will Be Too Small”:
Soon this space will be too small
And I’ll go outside
To the huge hillside
Where the wild winds blow
And the cold stars shine
I’ll put my foot
On the living road
And be carried from here
To the heart of the world
When Lhasa was 13, she saw a documentary on Billie Holiday that proved to be a key inspiration. By that time, her parents had split up, and her mother had moved Lhasa and her sisters to San Francisco. There she began singing in a Greek cafe while she was going to high school.
When one of her older sisters later moved to Montreal to attend renowned circus school Ècole Nationale de Cirque, the other sisters followed. At 19 in Montreal, looking for work as a singer, Lhasa met Yves Desrosiers, the guitarist for popular Quebecois rocker Jean Leloup, and the two began to perform together and collaborate on original songs, many drawn from the traditional rancheras Lhasa grew up with.
“She taught me about all of these artists from Latin America,” Desrosiers said in an interview. “I just started to listen and said, ‘OK, we’ll do it — but in our way.’ I would not have thought at the time that it would become what it did. We were just two young people who wanted to play music and try to make a little bit of money.”
Despite singing in Spanish to French and English-speaking Montrealers, Lhasa and Desrosiers’s band quickly attracted a large following, keyed to imaginative arrangements that added rock, Romani music and other folk forms to the Latin melodies in support of her dramatic performances. Canadian music journalist Nicholas Jennings, who became an early supporter, found Lhasa riveting. “What she was putting across transcended language,” Jennings said in a 2019 interview. “She had all the depth of emotion of an actress or opera singer. You couldn’t take your eyes off her.”
Lhasa’s debut album, “La Llorona” (1997), won a Juno Award, Canada’s equivalent of a Grammy, and launched her as an international performer. In the United States, where she remained almost wholly unknown, she nonetheless found a following among other performers, many of whom viewed her as an artists’ artist.
“I was in Europe in the ’90s and somebody played me ‘La Llorona,’” Calexico guitarist Joey Burns said in an interview. “I remember staying up all night in Belgium listening to that record. To me, her voice is right up there with the great Portuguese fado singers like Amália Rodrigues and Mercedes Sosa. She has that depth.”
Feist said she first heard “La Llorona” in Toronto when a departing roommate left his stereo and several albums behind. “I can situate that first memorable listen in one particular bath I took,” she recalled with a laugh. “It became foundational. At that time I had come from hardcore bands and was just shifting to the other foot from the power of volume to the power of restraint.” Feist’s band now includes Lhasa’s former drummer, Andrew Barr, whom she met while playing a series of Lhasa tributes in Europe that also featured French-born singer Mina Tindle and her husband, Bryce Dessner, a guitarist for the National.
Bassist Miles Perkin played in Lhasa’s band and on her final album, recorded when she had cancer. “The process of the record was up and down,” he said. “The fight. I felt the music was a beacon of possibilities and positivity for her; that we were a group of friends trying to provide this outlet for her. You could feel how much she wanted to finish it and play these songs for people. It was always joyful, even through all the struggles.”
The fact that Estrada, a Mexican singer-songwriter, and Molina, a musician and actress from Argentina, are performing in the tribute is another indication of Lhasa’s continuing worldwide appeal. Estrada said she discovered Lhasa on YouTube when she was 11. “One of those early miracles of the internet,” she said in an email. “The way she sings is so full of mystery. Sometimes it’s like listening to an old, old wise lady and other times it’s like a young playful soul creating poems full of light. It fills me with passion.” Those feelings recently drew Estrada to Montreal, where she recorded with some of Lhasa’s former musicians.
When not on tour in Europe, Lhasa could be found around the neighborhood, walking Montreal’s frigid winter streets in an antique leather aviator’s helmet, swimming and hitting the steam room at the YMCA, or writing in a neighborhood coffee bar.
“You’d bump into her at the Social Club cafe,” Pop Montreal promoter Dan Seligman said. “‘Oh! It’s Lhasa!’ She was pretty famous, and I admired how down to earth and personable she was.”
Still her fame never extended to the United States, and she sought to remedy that with her final album. Despite having received the diagnosis of breast cancer in June 2008, she continued working with her band, recording “Lhasa” live to tape, her increasingly brittle voice unadorned and mesmerizing. She followed its April 2009 release with concerts in Montreal, Paris and Reykjavik, Iceland, but grew too ill to tour America.
Lhasa died at her home in Mile End on New Year’s Day, 2010. Barr, the guitarist, continues to live in the neighborhood, and the loss remains difficult for him to accept. “We just thought she was going to be the diva into her 80s and that she would always be schooling us,” he said. “She still might be.”
This article originally appeared in
The New York Times.
