Life and Music of Lhasa de Sela

“Here’s Lhasa, who died New Year’s Day in Montreal.”

That’s how Jeannie Hopper introduced me to Lhasa de Sela.

Jeannie hosted Liquid Sound Lounge, a not-to-be-missed Saturday evening show on WBAI in New York, and I always counted on hearing several good records that I didn’t know. I’m not sure what I expected after that introduction, but it wasn’t this: a cold, shivering shimmer of bells and wind chimes and a low, rhythmic rumble like the voice of the earth that I previously had heard only in the music of Tibet’s Gyuto Monks. Over it, a Don Cherry-inspired trumpet solo floated like a dry desert wind. We were someplace far away and unforgiving, someplace alien and elemental, following an ancient, difficult path under a giant night sky. Yet, the singer, who was both breathless and young, betrayed no fear or trepidation. If anything, she was an adventurer—and a philosopher in the bargain:

You’ve traveled this long

You just have to go on
Don’t even look back to see
How far you’ve come
Though your body is bending
Under the load
There is nowhere to stop
Anywhere on this road.

It was mesmerizing and ambitious, musically sophisticated and emotionally advanced—the most intelligent pop record I had heard in a very long time. Lhasa? How could I have not heard of her? How could any artist capable of this die quiet and unknown? Perhaps, I thought, this record, “Anywhere on This Road,” was a fluke—an inspired overreach in an otherwise pedestrian career.

Either way, I needed to hear more. It’s said that seeing is believing, but listening has always been my most reliable route to knowing, so the next morning I went digging for the song’s album, The Living Road. It took just a verse of its opening track, “Con Toda Palabra” (“With Every Word”), an explicit and passionately sung ballad about being not just lovestruck but completely inflamed with desire, to know that what I had heard the night before was no fluke. Lhasa de Sela could sing and Lhasa de Sela could feel—and Lhasa de Sela had been for real. I had to know who she was and why I had never heard her music.

I soon learned that the American-born singer had been 37 when she lost a grievous struggle with breast cancer. And I would also learn that, though she was unfamiliar to me and most Americans, Lhasa was a star in Canada and much of Europe, having earned a gold record and Juno Awards by absorbing and synthesizing such diverse strains as Gypsy music and flamenco, Mexican rancheras, Americana and jazz, Portuguese fado, Middle Eastern pop songs, Russian lullabies, chanson française, and South American folk melodies into her own unique and remarkable work. Over a thirteen-year recording career, she made just three albums: the first was in Spanish; the second, in Spanish, French, and English; and the last, exclusively in English. Lhasa’s second album, The Living Road, won her the 2005 BBC Radio 3 World Music Award for Best Artist of the Americas and the Times of London named it one of the ten best world music albums of the decade.

Celebrated abroad, she has remained unknown in the United States. American record companies, quick to recognize her talent and license her work, proved nowhere near as adept at promoting Lhasa and introducing her to listeners. Her biggest bar to American success was obvious: approximately half of the limited number of recordings she had made weren’t in English—a deal-breaker in a country where most of us aren’t used to being asked to step outside the familiar walls of our Anglophone mass culture. But her linguistic choices don’t hinder comprehension: as with poems, Lhasa’s songs convey feeling before the meaning is fully grasped.


The shameful irony is that her consciousness was wholly American—daring and iconoclastic for sure, extraordinarily far-reaching and humanistic, but still homegrown. I suspect she was this country’s first world music chanteuse, and it bothered her deeply not to be heard here. It isn’t just her big ears for eclectic music that make Lhasa and her records singular. There is also a rare thoughtfulness and wide-eyed sensuality in her work. She saw the world as imbued with magic and romance and a cosmic design—a dramatic and poetic outlook she expressed with wit and lyricism.

But Lhasa was also a bootstrap intellectual. The child of an unorthodox family, she had been urged from an early age to both take herself seriously and treat life as an adventure, and she responded by adopting punishingly high standards and expectations. An obsessive and deep reader, she turned an insatiable philosophic bent toward life’s unanswerable questions, and that search became the wellspring of her songs. In her use of three languages one senses both a frustration with and a reach for deeper and more exact meanings, as if our day-to-day language doesn’t quite get it done. Yet, her sophistication was leavened with romanticism and humor and made fresh by a naïf’s ability to experience the world with unreserved wonder; she remained incapable of being jaded.

Lhasa’s premature death notwithstanding, her three albums constitute a diary of a life’s search and a full artistic journey. To put it plainly, I believe she was a significant artist who should be recognized and this book seeks to rectify that. But the work isn’t the only arresting aspect of her story: Lhasa was not just an artist but also a true bohème. She lived a creative, romantic, uncompromising, and brave life.

Her hippie family lived much of the time in a converted school bus, crisscrossing between the United States and Mexico. Lhasa grew up without a telephone or television, and she was homeschooled by her parents, who rejected the bulk of material and social assumptions of mainstream American life. At the same time, they were fierce about instilling in their children an unquenchable curiosity, a deep devotion to spiritual and intellectual advancement, and the veneration of creativity. And because they succeeded, Lhasa would always remain somewhat estranged from society at large and a loner at heart, unable in particular to fathom the lack of curiosity and discipline in so many of the people she met. Hers was, to borrow a phrase from Emmett Grogan, a life played for keeps. For those of us who have fantasized about living such a life, ignoring conventions and having the courage to be that kind of parent, Lhasa’s extraordinary story is romantic and inspiring.

It also, however, sounds a cautionary note as to what that choice can cost. Seeking freedom on the margins, the family lived an exhilarating but financially and emotionally precarious existence. They were ever on the move and ever on the edge. The consequences were a jarring lack of permanence, an element of real danger—strange people, strange surroundings, little in the way of a safety net—and an enduring feeling of isolation and otherness. That experience, coupled with a family legacy of hurt, strife, and tragedy that predated her birth, would weave the blue threads of sadness and insecurity into Lhasa’s personality. And when the once tight-knit fabric of that family tore apart—the only world she knew—the anger and pain from that rip never completely mended.

Lhasa’s friends and musical collaborators tell stories of a singularly enchanting and intense person, the once-in-a-lifetime friend who could be hilarious or dark, both childlike and dauntingly complex—an unendingly creative and deep-thinking woman who giggled like a young girl but could be rough on the people she loved and brutal to herself. As her music attests, she felt life intensely and was both enraptured by the mystery and deeply bruised by the realities of love. When diagnosed with cancer, Lhasa struggled to comprehend it and seemed lost. I believe what she felt was betrayal—as doubtless any person cut down before their time might—but a betrayal made that much more shocking and awful by her unquestioning faith in and excitement about the magic of life, a magic she had turned herself inside out to capture, shape, and share in hundreds of deeply focused and surprisingly intimate performances and three transcendent, death-denying albums.

A sorceress of the soul, Lhasa conjured the unknowable and the amazing, and in her all-too-brief life, she became the medium of that message. “There was always this mystery,” says Arthur H, a French musician who was one of her close friends, “this damn mystery that was there because of her intensity.”

Welcome to the mystery.

Excerpted from Why Lhasa de Sela Matters,  by Fred Goodman.  University of Texas Press, 2019.

The Romantic, Uncompromising, Audacious Life of Lhasa de Sela. By Fred Goodman, LitHub, December 20, 2019.

A sorceress of the soul, the multi-lingual singer Lhasa de Sela captivated music fanatics around the world with her spellbinding songs and other-worldly performances. Yet ten years after her tragic death from breast cancer in Montreal at 37, America’s first world music chanteuse remains largely and inexplicably unknown here, an under-the-radar icon in her own country. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, her first biography, charts Lhasa’s road to musical maturity. —Fred Goodman

The slowest nights for bars and clubs come early in the week, which is why many clubs are closed on Mondays, leaving Tuesday as the lightest night of the week. As a result, Lhasa de Sela didn’t waitress on Tuesdays. Instead, she found local Montreal bars that would let her sing a set a cappella. Wearing a black dress and a long knit hat, she cut a figure that was both striking and subdued.

Working on assorted standards and the Billie Holiday songs she loved, Lhasa was primarily focused on two tasks: overcoming her own shyness and learning how to hold a listener’s attention. She had a ways to go.

“It was like torture to sit in the audience,” says Lhasa’s sister Sky. “Everyone was talking, and I knew she was thinking they would shut up. But they didn’t immediately, and I sat there, suffering! She was giving her all. She sang with so much emotion, yet they kept on talking. So I left before she managed to shut them up. The next time I saw her was a few years later at the Bataclan in Paris — and I can tell you that no one talked!”

But at that point, it was hard to see where Lhasa was going, if anywhere. Visiting his daughters, Alejandro was upset when he opened Lhasa’s refrigerator and found only a small plastic pig that moved in circles and oinked when the door light came on; otherwise, the refrigerator was bare. He treated her to a parental shopping trip. And when she announced she was quitting her job, he delivered a fatherly sermon. “Lhasa, you don’t have any food! You’re behind in your rent. You have to work! Don’t quit your job — you need that job.”

Lhasa shook her head. “Papa, I’m a singer. If I can’t sing — if I can’t make my living singing — I don’t want to live,” she said.

The pragmatic and industrious Sky felt an older sister’s dismay and disapproval. Fearful that Lhasa was being irrational and lazy, Sky wondered when she was going to stop hanging out in cafes and get a real job. “Which was a bunch of baloney,” she says. “Actually, she was building it, leaning toward it. But you couldn’t see it from the outside.”

In fact, Lhasa was going through an intense period of absorption in which her skills as an autodidact served her well. After working in a small Quebec town for a few months, she returned to Montreal with a working command of conversational French. A self-starter for whom learning was synonymous with growth and growth synonymous with life, she needed no prompt to study. She sought to express herself as concisely and thoughtfully as possible — and not just in her music. She was also a devout letter writer and thought nothing of spending hours on a letter. More documents than casual missives, they might include ink sketches — a person, a place, a self-portrait — framed neatly by the text. Each was a finished work, and it is doubtful she mailed first drafts: no matter the language she wrote in, there was never a cross-out or revision. “My letters from Lhasa sustained me for years,” says Sky.

Musically, her tastes were broad, but her system of learning was extremely simple and extremely focused. When she heard something in an artist or a recording that she wanted to emulate, she listened to the work incessantly for extended periods — sometimes months at a clip — until it was second nature. Particularly formative were some of the artists she had picked up on from her parents, such as the legendary cabaret star Chavela Vargas.

Costa Rican-born Vargas was a masterful singer of extraordinary depths who first rose to fame in the 1950s as a gender-bending nightclub star in Mexico City. It wasn’t only that the hard-drinking Vargas dressed like a man, smoked cigars, and packed a gun, she also took possession of the rancheras traditionally performed by male singers while directing them to women. An intimate of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, she befriended many of Mexico’s leading songwriters and intellectuals, including the novelist Juan Rulfo, and later became a muse to the Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar and an international icon. She made her Carnegie Hall debut in 2003 at the age of eighty-three — two years after coming out publicly and proudly declaring she had never had sex with a man. Vargas continued to work and record — her aging voice singed by life but more moving than ever — almost up to her death ten years later. “I listened to those intense ballads all day, every day, for years!” Lhasa said.

She developed a similar obsession with the Lebanese oud player and singer, Marcel Khalifé, an artist whose records Alexandra had played. “There is a cassette that I have listened to hundreds of times — maybe thousands — and I know every single vocal inflection on that cassette,” she told BBC reporter Stefan Christoff, stressing that it wasn’t just about technique, but an attempt to connect with and intuit something of the ways that meaning and emotion were conveyed by an Arabic singer and “a little window into Arab culture.” She found that the recordings of the Russian singer Vladimir Vysotsky likewise gave her some insight and an appreciation for that culture. “I don’t speak Russian but I could just hear the humor, intelligence, rage and cleverness in Vysotsky’s voice,” she said. “This is the magic of music.”

Lhasa’s musical tastes were largely defined by what she had heard her itinerant hippie parents play in the school bus where they lived for years, but her own earnestness would lead her to emulate the singers of deepest feeling: those capable of not only conveying the meaning of a song’s lyrics but also crystallizing emotions beyond words. Likewise, her romanticism and spirituality led her to embrace singers such as Holiday and Vargas, whose music was inseparable from their tribulations, making them her artistic saints. The more she listened to and examined how a particular piece of music or performance made her feel, the surer she became of her personal aesthetics. “She was very opinionated,” says her sister Miriam. “She knew what she liked and didn’t like. I remember many times going to see a show with Lhasa and she’d say, ‘That was terrible, it was nothing.’ To her it was very black and white. And that always impressed me. She knew exactly what she thought.”

The next time she saw Yves Desrosiers, the guitarist with Quebec rocker Jean Leloup, was at an outdoor café on Rue Saint-Denis. This time, she had the confidence to say she was a singer and to talk about what she liked. Writing his phone number on a matchbook, Yves suggested they get together and see what happened. “Maybe we can play in the subway or the street,” he said.

Lhasa let a few weeks pass before phoning. In September, Yves came to her apartment with his guitar and a fake book, and they tried a few standards. Listening to the way Lhasa sang, Yves wasn’t sure what to make of her. It was obvious that she lacked experience, and despite taking her cue from Billie Holiday she didn’t sound at all like a classic female jazz singer. “Her voice was somewhere else,” he says. “Kind of androgynous, but strangely intriguing.”

Looking for something else to try, he asked Lhasa if she liked bossa nova; she offered that she knew the Portuguese lyrics to a few Antônio Carlos Jobim songs. As soon as they started playing, Desrosiers could hear they were on a better track. “I felt something strong and smooth,” he says. “And I told myself, If this voice can reach me, it can reach a lot of people.”

As if to second that, Lhasa’s neighbor stuck her head in the door. She and a friend had been sitting outside, sunning themselves and drinking wine. “Was that really you singing like that?” she asked.

By winter 1993, they had built a little repertoire, and Yves arranged a gig playing happy hour at a neighborhood bar he frequented. They performed mostly jazz standards and one or two Mexican rancheras that Lhasa had discovered through her parents’ record collection. Yves was intrigued that this was a large part of the music she had listened to growing up. He liked the strange stories about her hippie childhood in the school bus and urged her to think about singing more songs in Spanish and fewer jazz standards. Aside from the fact that Lhasa sounded better singing them, Yves was convinced that it would make her stand out. “You really want to play that?” she asked guardedly. When he said he did, she was delighted.

With Lhasa pointing him toward specific records and performers, Yves began listening to more and more rancheras and other Latin recordings, and he bought a nylon-string guitar. The more they played, the more convinced Yves became that he and Lhasa were moving in the right direction. Erik West-Millette, the bassist who had met Lhasa at the Mondiale, was a close friend of Yves and they talked frequently about Lhasa. The guitarist was impressed by the surprising power and conviction she brought to the traditional Mexican songs and told Erik he saw an opportunity for her to develop a unique niche. There was no shortage of jazz singers on the Montreal club scene and this could be something different.

Though recording and working steadily with more established artists such as Leloup and the folk duo Gogh Van Go, Yves knew that he and Lhasa were onto something. “I was busy working for bands and solo artists, but I was motived each time we played,” Yves says. He also saw that Lhasa was green and that her enthusiasm outstripped her experience. He wanted to boost her confidence by working as many gigs as possible. Over the next two years her French improved markedly — as did her ability to interact with audiences and tell stories between songs — and they began polishing a few ideas for demos in the small four-track “bedroom lab” Yves used as a home studio.

“She was damn lucky to meet Yves,” says musician Patrick Watson, who was close with both Lhasa and Desrosiers. “The writing on that record is superb, and Yves is a really interesting guy; she ran into someone really caring. And also, like her, a bit out of this world. Similarly sensitive and reserved. It was a beautiful moment.”

Yves and Lhasa spent long evenings talking about the kind of music they wanted to make and the elements they wanted to feature in the arrangements. Both were fans of the French band Bratsch, whose Gypsy music incorporates klezmer, jazz, North African, and other folk traditions. Yves pursued a similar eclectic approach in his arrangements, which Lhasa eagerly embraced: if the music’s roots were largely Mexican, its leaves and branches were far more varied. Unable to play an instrument or write music, Lhasa conveyed her melodic ideas by singing, whistling, or humming, relying on Yves to flesh them out harmonically. Just as eager to develop Yves’s ideas, she took recordings of several of his melodies home and wrote lyrics. Two songs grew out of this, “El Desierto” (“The Desert”) and “El Pájaro” (“The Bird”).

El Desierto - YouTube

In 1994, one of their early demo tapes landed on the desk of Gina Brault, a Montreal radio programmer whose duties included booking performances for a live broadcast originating in a local bar. “A musician friend gave me a cassette with Desrosiers written on it and a phone number,” she says. “I had no idea what was waiting for me.” Indeed, though she loved the music and quickly arranged for them to appear on the show, Gina certainly didn’t imagine she would become their manager — and Yves’s wife.

With Yves as a musical partner and mentor, Lhasa was finding her lyrical and thematic inspiration in her ongoing conversations with her father. Even by the insular standards of their family, Lhasa and Alejandro had an unusually tight bond. “I have seven children, but Lhasa was unique,” he says. “She was so intimately involved in those things that were close to me.” And while Lhasa’s half-sister, Samantha, describes both their sister Ayin and their mother as more interested in spiritual practices than Lhasa — “She was not a pillow-sitter,” Samantha says — it was Lhasa who gleaned the cultural and artistic implications from her parents’ spiritual and mystical quest. Indeed, when she later told an interviewer that she “believes in everything — Buddha, Jesus Christ, Lau Tzu, astrology,” it was easy to discern the hand of Alejandro. As wide-ranging as Lhasa’s reading list was, many of the works she returned to again and again were the spiritual and theoretical texts that her parents favored, including I Ching, Paramahansa Yogananda’s Autobiography of a Yogi, the teachings of Krishnamurti, and Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

“Our father says he does everything,” says Eden, “but when I read Autobiography of a Yogi as an adult, I realized that was really his core and what we were all raised with: these cosmic, mystical ideas about consciousness that are quasi-philosophical, quasi-spiritual, and quasi-scientific. It’s hard to explain, but we were raised to perceive reality in a very interesting way. There was something literally psychedelic about our upbringing and the culture we were raised in. And it affected us.”

Along with a streak of solemnity, Alejandro also shared with Lhasa a love of conversation. A gifted raconteur, he could be spellbinding while telling a story — a skill she would absorb and make a feature of her performances. “Her father had a great influence on her,” says Yves. “They spoke the same language.”

With Marybeth’s encouragement, Alejandro had turned his Mexican forays as a language instructor into a career in upstate New York as a high school and college Spanish teacher. As Lhasa and Yves were crafting their first songs and demos, Alejandro was completing his dissertation at the University at Albany for a PhD in Spanish literature, with a focus on the literature of the Mexican conquest. “It was a huge topic, and he and Lhasa talked about it for hours and hours and hours,” says Lhasa’s stepmother Marybeth. “We would talk all night long,” adds Alejandro.

Those conversations added greater depth and context to the way Lhasa thought about the rancheras that she and Yves had been performing. Just as key, her father’s research and writing opened a new window on both the literature of Spain and the pre-Columbian Aztec poetry that, taken together, informed much of the subsequent Mexican culture.

One of the most well-known Mexican folk tales is the legend of La Llorona, variously translated as the weeping or wailing woman. Lhasa knew it as the mournful ballad recorded and popularized decades earlier by Chavela Vargas, and she sometimes performed the song in bars with Yves. But there are countless versions of the folk song, including some associated with the Mexican Revolution, and the legend that gave rise to them has just as many permutations and meanings. In perhaps its most well-known version, the legend tells the tragic and gruesome story of a woman betrayed by an unfaithful husband. In a fit of insanity, she punishes him by drowning their children; she is then doomed to wander eternally, crying after her children. Like American murder ballads, the folk tale served to castigate and caution women against giving in to their passions. Even today, a wailing Mexican wind is called la llorona.

Yet, as her father learned and shared with her, the story of La Llorona has an Aztec lineage as well, one that made the legendary woman far more prescient and heroic. In that version, she is a Native American Cassandra, appearing in a dream to warn of the arrival of the Spanish in 1519 and the coming conquest and enslavement of the people. “The Emperor of Mexico had a series of nine premonitions that his sorcerers said were alarming,” says Alejandro. “One was of a rain of comets and another was of a wind blowing through Tenochtitlan and of a voice that could be heard in the wind — a woman’s voice wailing, ‘My children, my children, what will become of my children?’ The sorcerers called her La Llorona, and Lhasa was very taken with that story when I told her.”

Inspired, she wrote the lyrics to what would become “De Cara a la Pared” (“Facing the Wall”), the opening song on her debut album, La Llorona. Based on an apocalyptic dream she had had of a city destroyed by fire and flood, it was a like-minded warning and a prayer for deliverance from suffering and hardship. Arranged on a lilting, airy violin theme by Yves, the album, like the ancient warning of La Llorona, seemed to float in on the breeze.

The ongoing conversations with Alejandro would provide the seeds for several songs, including “Los Peces,” her take on one of Spain’s oldest Christmas songs; “El Payande,” a Colombian song from the 1870s; and “Por Eso Me Quedo” (“Why I Stay”), in the style of the great ranchero performer Cuco Sànchez. “La Celestina” is sung in the voice of a character from the Spanish play of the same name written by Fernando de Rojas in 1499, a tragicomic Romeo and Juliet. And with Alejandro she co-wrote the lyrics to “Floricanto,” which echoed both the ecstatic poems of the sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross and the traditional Mexican theme of the tragic nature of love and life. Though Lhasa listened to and loved music made by contemporary rockers — Tom Waits and Rage Against the Machine were particular favorites at the time — she had made an obvious decision to dig where no one else had. It wasn’t a calculated decision.

“Her understanding of Mexican music was that it tended to be songs of broken-heartedness, of un-love and dis-love,” her father says: “Slavery: my mother was a slave so I was a slave. The lyrics to the song we wrote together have to do with mortality. I was reading Aztec poetry at the time and sharing it with her. That poetry was all things are passing; don’t be attached to life, we’re all here for a short time, we all must die. How the finest clothes turn to rags. This pessimistic strain in Aztec poetry carried on into Mexican folk music and cowboy songs that say, ‘You’re going to be sorry; I just laugh at the world because I know it’s going to end, too.’ Resignation to mortality is a predominant feature of Mexican culture and she picked up on that. And that vocal style that she was initially known for is the broken heartbreak yodel born from that music. Like Billie Holiday, it is tragic and sad, and speaks of suffering, pain, and hardship.”

Back in Montreal, Yves and Lhasa had expanded their performances to include the bassist Mario Légaré, accordionist Didier Dumouthier, and drummer François Lalonde. Like Yves, they were all experienced veterans of the Francophone recording and club scene and quick musical studies: wherever Yves and Lhasa took the songs, they could follow. Word of mouth was beginning to spread around town about the young Spanish singer with an unusual name and a good band, cemented by regular gigs at several bars. The same unusual level of awareness and thought that had immediately struck friends like Sandra and Lousnak in their conversations with Lhasa was now becoming just as apparent in her performances: on stage, Lhasa became intensely conscious of trying to make a connection with each and any listener. “Singing in the bars I learned how to reach people,” she said. “Even people who were there just for beer and conversation.”

She was singing now with an intensity that, regardless of language, made for a riveting performance. “When I started singing and I got up on stage a lot of kind of unexpected things started coming out of me,” Lhasa said. “There was a lot of sadness and a lot of rage. And those were the songs that I was attracted to singing. They were the songs that I felt the most when I was on stage.”

Guitarist Rick Haworth, a veteran of the Montreal music scene who toured extensively with Lhasa, says her onstage focus and commitment were extraordinary. “Lhasa had a work ethic that was brilliant and crazy,” he says. “If she didn’t bleed herself dry with every performance, she believed she was cheating the audience. …There was no compromise: you had to bleed.”

“Her shows were so personal and intimate,” says Sandra Khouri. “She was extremely straightforward and kind of pure. In French we would say she was sans fla-flas—without pretensions. Absolutely none. It wasn’t a show — you were going into her universe. She was a real magician of the soul.”

Jamie O’Meara, editor of the Montreal entertainment magazine The Hour, had no idea who she was the first time he saw her. “She cut my then-girlfriend’s hair,” he recalled. “And this girlfriend dragged me out to Bar Barouf on Saint-Denis one cold January night to hear her haircutter sing.” Wishing he was somewhere else and expecting nothing, O’Meara was stunned by what he heard — and by the audience’s reaction. “It was, to say the least, transformative. I would see her again at the small pub Else’s on Roi, and a handful of other quaint not-quite-venues where she was beginning to accrue a fiercely loyal following.”

One of those followers was Canadian music journalist Nicholas Jennings. It didn’t bother him that Lhasa was singing in Spanish rather than French or English. In fact, it felt completely immaterial. “The language really did not make any difference,” he says. “What she was putting across transcended language, she was such an intense performer. She had all the depth of emotion of an actress or an opera singer. You couldn’t take your eyes off her.”

The Montreal buzz that Gina had hoped for quickly materialized. A prime-time TV program on the Canadian Broadcasting Channel featured Lhasa and Yves dueting on a Mexican folk song. The next week the line at Quai des Brumes was down the block.

It didn’t hurt that the local music scene had a vibrancy and fire that were both palpable and building. “Lhasa was coming out of a Montreal that was awesome,” says Patrick Watson. “It was a magical moment — the kind you read about in a book and say, ‘Fuck! I wish I was there!’ My first show was in a porno theater. It was outside the ‘stage’ context so you were putting on an experience, not a show. People are there to have a good time. We used to play Café Sarajevo. They’d give you drinks and you’d sing on the tables. There was no business, no managers. We were completely sheltered from any idea of selling our music. One of the jokes is that French culture turned Montreal into an island. A lot of benefits came — it’s one of the reasons we have good film directors—but business-wise, you’re isolated and it’s hard to get off the island. That meant someone like Lhasa or me or Godspeed You! Black Emperor were artistically free to avoid bullshit.”

Moving from Yves’s home recording setup to a small studio that François operated in a second-floor apartment between the Plateau and Chinatown on Saint-Denis, the guitarist and the drummer polished the backing tracks for Lhasa to add the vocals on a demo. When he and Lhasa were satisfied, Yves called Denis Wolff, an A&R executive at Montreal’s Audiogram Records. Yves had worked with him on recordings for Jean Leloup and Gogh Van Go. Wolff, who had come to respect Yves and admire his work, liked the demo. And he liked what he saw from Lhasa in performance even more.

A leading French label, Audiogram had released a few records in English, but never in Spanish. No one was particularly concerned, though. “In Quebec, there’s a strong tradition of liking world artists like Cesária Évora,” Wolff says, and Audiogram had already had some success licensing and releasing an album in Italian by Paulo Conte. “These records did really well here, and we also have the jazz festival, which educated people.”

Continuing in François’s studio, Lhasa concentrated on her vocals, but was loath to take even a small instrumental role. Says Desrosiers, “Lhasa was a bit intimidated back in those days about the recording process because she didn’t play an instrument and I think she was afraid she would mess up my work. “As a result, Yves became the music director of La Llorona, trading inspirations and melodic ideas with Lhasa and then building the arrangements and performances with François and the other musicians in the studio. “Lhasa was not present much,” says François. “Yves and I would work on the music, and when it was ready, Lhasa would come in to sing or Yves would go to her house with a microphone.” Several of the vocals recorded in her kitchen and initially intended to be used as guides proved good enough for the final record; a summer rain storm in Lhasa’s backyard provided the album’s opening sounds. “Yes, I was the architect of that record and sound,” says Yves. “But Lhasa brought it to life. Without her voice and soul, we would not be talking today.”

If the music and lyrics on La Llorona represented a unique and thoughtful exploration of a culture and tradition unknown to most listeners, the arrestingly colored yet stark painting she created for its cover dispelled any notion that this was a sociology project or a hip and obscure idea born of a clever ingénue’s vanity. Rather, something intensely personal was at work. Lhasa used a mirror to paint what has been described as a self-portrait, but the piercing fiery eyes, hawk-like visage, and dark, somber facial tones are far more suggestive of her mother, Alexandra.

Though Lhasa certainly loved her mother, they had an unusually gnarled relationship. An unusually creative and deep-thinking person wrestling with a self-destructive streak, Alexandra was a complicated and sometimes foreboding figure, a person who, as a mother, could be extremely nurturing and almost as frightening. A former heroin user who had lost custody of her two eldest daughters when one of them fell out a window, Alexandra’s struggle to reclaim Lhasa’s half-sisters had been a significant part of Lhasa’s peripatetic childhood — as had Alexandra’s sometimes explosive rages. Lhasa could not quite forgive or forget the dramatic and caustic scenes that she associated with the splintering of the family. She could not completely make peace with her mother — a painful situation that a now clean and sober Alexandra tried to accept with clarity.

“She was hard on herself,” says Alexandra. “Her journals are full of that. Endlessly. But she had plenty to say about others, too. We had some wonderful times and laughed a lot — her magnificent sense of humor saved her sometimes — but she couldn’t be with me for long. It was almost as if she wished I was not quite who I am, wished I were different. You can’t really do that.”

Yet, whatever continuing frustrations and anger Lhasa may have felt toward Alexandra, the cover of La Llorona suggests that the album wasn’t just paying tribute to a mythic mother wailing for her lost children. Lhasa didn’t have to look across time to find a grief-stricken woman whose self-inflicted wounds and painful, self-destructive missteps had cost her her children. She had crisscrossed from Mexico to New York in cradle and car seat as that mother struggled to remake herself and regain her eldest daughters.

“Lhasa was alchemically able to take stories from our life that were tragic and turn them around and tell them in a way that would honor our family,” says her sister Ayin. “I think it was a self-healing tool for her to turn the pain into meaningful, soulful journeys that everyone can use as inspiration and hope and humor.”

“When Lhasa was singing that darker thing — the way a fado singer would sing about the saddest life in the world — that comes from her mom,” says Lhasa’s friend Patrick Watson. “No mistake. That’s her mother. The philosophy stories? That’s her dad. But the shit where she opens her mouth and the world stops? Lhasa would be so fucking mad if she heard me say it, but that comes from her mom. I think Lhasa was singing the depth of her mother’s experiences. She didn’t experience them herself, but she saw the twists and turns.”

Released in 1997, La Llorona garnered strong reviews, and Lhasa’s following in Montreal and Quebec grew quickly. Its unique sound and tragic, passionate, romantic lyrics managed to both evoke an ancient mythic world and strike a timely resonance. Musician Thomas Hellman, who would become romantically involved with Lhasa some years later, was an undergraduate studying French literature at McGill University when La Llorona came out. “That album blew my mind,” he said. “It came out in a dark and cynical time and on La Llorona she was able to embody romantic love and painful love at a time when that archetype was absent and sorely needed — it just didn’t exist between people that much anymore.”

BBC reviewer Malachy O’Neill said Lhasa sounded like nothing so much as an ancient matriarch and wondered how someone so young had conjured “heartbroken songs from a long life of exodus and lost love, offering ominous warnings of the weirder, darker corners of the human heart.”

“Almost right away there was success locally,” says Denis Wolff. Several months after the album’s release, Audiogram hired a publicist in Toronto and began publicizing the record in English-speaking Canada, a first step toward establishing Lhasa not just in the rest of Canada, but also in other English language markets, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Instead, events took a different turn: the stars were about to line up.

Shortly after the release of La Llorona, the band was invited to submit an application for a music competition. First prize was a trip to France and an appearance at the well-regarded Printemps de Bourges music festival. Neither Lhasa nor Yves liked the idea of playing in a competition, but Gina ignored them and put in the paperwork. A few months later, Lhasa and her band found themselves among the finalists performing at Montreal’s Club Soda for an audience and a panel of judges. They came in first.

Excited by the opportunity to take a full band to France, they didn’t quite understand what they had really won: Lhasa would be touted as the French-Canadian prizewinner at the festival’s “Discoveries” series, one of the European music industry’s most prestigious showcases. “I did not realize how much of a professional event this was, that it was not really for the public,” says Gina. And once again, Lhasa was a hit. “After the performance, there was a line of industry people who wanted to meet Lhasa.” Among them was Yves Beauvais from Atlantic Records in New York, who would release La Llorona in the States.

More important for Lhasa, however, would be her relationship with Tôt ou Tard, a savvy and well-run label that signed her for France. And they did so in no small measure at the urging of French music journalist Anne-Marie Paquotte, who had been impressed by her performance at Bourges. Then, in advance of Lhasa’s Paris debut at the Bataclan, Paquotte wrote a glowing feature on her for Télérama, the country’s most influential entertainment magazine. The result was instantaneous: overnight, Lhasa became a star in France.

Brazilian singer Bïa Krieger, who later became Lhasa’s close friend, was living and working in France when La Llorona came out and Paquotte’s article launched her. “Everybody was talking about her. Have you heard this girl, Lhasa? Have you heard this record? Getting an article in Télérama then was like having an article in Rolling Stone in 1968. Then everyone takes you seriously, everyone wants an interview. You couldn’t go into a music shop without hearing her; her music was on the radio. Every festival I played at it was, Do you know her? I’m not a jealous person but you almost could be. Lhasa, Lhasa, Lhasa. It was huge.”

Over the subsequent months, Lhasa and the band performed and built a following not just in France but also in Germany, Switzerland, and Belgium. Perhaps as important, her success in Europe would cement her reputation back home.

“A Spanish record made in Quebec?” asks Bïa. “Not a magic potion you would do again! But this reaction in France allowed a project that could have stayed local to become something else. When she got famous in France, she came back to Canada with a different status. She started out in Montreal as this girl who sang beautifully in Spanish. When she came back, she was a star.”

Excerpted from Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, by Fred Goodman. University of Texas Press, 2019.

Why Lhasa de Sela Matters. By Fred Goodman. Longreads, November 2019.

As Fred Goodman makes clear in Why Lhasa de Sela Matters (University of Texas Press), the late world-music troubadour never made it easy on anyone. Start with her music. Lhasa (as she called herself professionally) was born and raised in America but became a one-stop global musician: Goodman accurately describes her blend of “Gypsy music and flamenco, Mexican rancheras, Americana and jazz, Portuguese fado, Middle Eastern pop songs, Russian lullabies,chanson française, and South American folk melodies.” A dramatic, exposed-nervous-system singer, she seemed to pour everything into a performance; it’s no surprise that she dabbled in fado, the emotive style of balladry that has been sung in Portugal for about 200 years.

If that wasn’t enough for some listeners to handle, Lhasa recorded many of those songs in Spanish or French, thus limiting her chances of breaking out in the States, and was unremittingly stubborn. She fled the music business at least once and shunned the “world music” tag that might have made her art more marketable. Sadly, she also didn’t make it easy on her own health. Diagnosed with near-stage-four breast cancer in 2008, she initially resisted chemo, opting for natural remedies, but even after she finally underwent radiation treatments, her cancer spread, and she died in January 2010.

As former Rolling Stone editor (and The Mansion on the Hill author) Goodman chronicles in this slim but absorbing book, which includes interviews with seemingly every major figure in her life, Lhasa’s life was as unconventional as her music. Her family is a story unto itself. Lhasa’s hippie father was the American-born son of a Mexican businessman and Panamanian concert pianist. Her mother was raised in New York, the black sheep of an artistic and wealthy family who went on to have a romance (and share heroin) with jazz bassist Charlie Haden. Lhasa herself was born in Woodstock, New York; she was home-schooled and grew up without a television.

The unusual nature of her childhood and teen years bled into her adult life. Her first album, 1997’s La Llorona, was named after a figure in Aztec mythology and was equally exotic and mysterious in its music, which blended folk from seemingly many different countries. Although not a crossover hit, it made enough of a splash to land Lhasa a slot on the inaugural Lilith Fair tour that year. To her dismay, though, she was relegated to the smaller second stage and later complained about the “whiny” quality of many of the female singer-songwriters on that tour.

Throughout Goodman’s book, the impression one gets is of an intense, driven artist who wasn’t always necessarily easy to be with (Goodman recounts her many relationships), and who had, in the words of her sister Miriam, an “insane integrity” about her. Blowing off a follow-up album that would capitalize on her buzz, she instead joined a circus — literally — when she moved to France to work on a traveling gypsy circus with her family members. Lhasa eventually wound up in Canada, where she had moved to attend a circus school, and finally made a second album in 2003. Although she came to see it as overproduced, The Living Road was her most commercially accessible record; two of its most moving songs, “Anywhere on This Road” and “Small Song,” should have become stalwarts on AAA-minded outlets like SiriusXM’s Spectrum channel.

But as with other experimentally minded singer-songwriters, like the late Tim Buckley, Lhasa insisted on tinkering with that formula. Her last studio album, 2009’s Lhasa, was another twist — stark and wrenching, reflecting the fact that she was battling her illness during its creation. That year, she was offered what would have surely been a breakthrough gig — as one of Leonard Cohen’s backup singers on his must-see comeback tour. Instead, she died months later, leaving behind a small but indelible legacy — pop music’s last boho, a ghost still waiting for someone to take up that mantle.

Bohemian Rhapsody: The Incredible Life of the Late World-Music Singer Lhasa. By David Browne. Rolling Stone, December 19, 2019.

Anywhere on this Road , YouTube

Rising , YouTube

Lhasa de Sela matters. So much is proven in Fred Goodman's new book from the University of Texas Press' "Music Matters" series, titled Why Lhasa de Sela Matters, the birth-to-death tale about the wildcard bohemian singer who lived a large chapter of her peculiar life in Canada.

A curious learner from birth, Lhasa de Sela was a musician with deep ties to the Montreal scene in the late '90s and early '00s. Her mere three records (including her Juno-winning debut La Llorona, as well as 2003's The Living Road and her final album Lhasa) attracted international acclaim, as well as the attention of artists like Patrick Watson, Feist, Sarah Pagé and Leonard Cohen, among others. Singing in multiple languages, de Sela would be relegated to "world music" sections of awards ceremonies and festival stages — a title she deeply resented, often asserting that her songs were "just music." Her final album was recorded shortly before she tragically succumbed to breast cancer at the age of 37.

Through gripping, dynamic storytelling, the author paints a lavish portrait of this sometimes-nomadic and temperamental, yet lovable artist. Using her curiosity-driven family as a contextual backdrop — including her unhinged mother Alexandra, her philosopher father Alejandro and her nine eccentric siblings — Goodman shows where the road less travelled can lead.

Despite her talent and often goofy behaviour, de Sela was a deeply sensitive woman. She grew up in the shadow of her talented sisters, realizing her path much later than anyone else in her family. Her halted progress caused her to develop insecurities about her worth early on in life, which she coped with by delving deeply into her vibrant imagination. There, she could rectify her sadness with fairytale-like concepts. "She said when she was a kid she always dreamed of having antlers," friend and collaborator Sarah Pagé says of the artist. "She thought if she had antlers, she'd be so beautiful. And everyone would look at her, see her antlers and realize how beautiful she was."

But she would grow into herself eventually. After moving to Montreal, Lhasa gained so much ground in the music scene through her enchanting performances and eclectic style. "It wasn't a show — you were going into her universe," Sandra Khouri tells Goodman. "She was a real magician of the soul."

Her captivating life is detailed with such care by its raconteur, who calls on de Sela's massive family, as well as fellow musicians, collaborators, friends and past lovers, to recount the rollercoaster story that is this mysterious character's life. Between her childhood living in a bus, moving to Montreal, recording her first album and blowing up in the music world (only to later join the circus), Goodman maps his subject's intricate story with the deepest consideration — never treating her like an artefact and never holding back on the grittiness de Sela both endured and inflicted on others.

Goodman's book — it matters too. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is divided into five chapters, but reads as one lengthy essay, making it a hypnotic read. Each chapter flows into the next seamlessly, stacking anecdotes with analysis, one on top of the other, for a story that you'll never want to end. But like all good things, it does end — and I'm sorry to say — tragically.

What makes Lhasa's story so pertinent now is its connection to so many times, places and people, and its resonance with the Canadian cultural landscape. This is an undertold story about an artist who embodied a multinational identity while living and creating in Canada — a narrative that is of profound familiarity and national relevance.

Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is a long, winding tale, with amazing highs and decimating lows, all about a rare and old soul, someone who was taken from this life far too soon. Fans and the uninitiated alike will be equally enthralled by this lovely and all-too-short story — one that is incredibly difficult to put down. (University of Texas Press)

Why Lhasa de Sela Matters By Fred Goodman. By  Allie Gregory.  Exclaim , December 10, 2019.

La llorona – 1997 - Complete album    YouTube

The Living Road -  2003  - Complete album   YouTube

Lhasa -  2009  - complete album  YouTube

Yves Desrosiers remembers when he first met Lhasa de Sela. The year was 1991, and the guitarist was working with Jean Leloup, having collaborated on the latter’s 1990 breakthrough album L’amour est sans pitié and the ensuing tour.

Little did he know de Sela would become his key collaborator for the next decade, which he would come to remember as “one of the greatest coups of my career.”

Lhasa (as she became known) was 18, freshly arrived from San Francisco, with “long hair, bleached by the sun,” Desrosiers said. She had come to Montreal to visit her three circus-performer sisters.

“One night a friend invited me to see a jazz singer, Térez Montcalm, at Café Campus. He brought along Lhasa, and we talked a lot. She knew I played with Jean Leloup, and she was impressed to meet someone who played with a Quebec superstar. She was funny, playful, but there was no question of music.”

A year later, Desrosiers bumped into Lhasa on a terrasse on St-Denis St., and the conversation quickly turned to just that.

“She said, ‘I want to sing,’ ” he recalled. “I said to my friend, ‘She sings? What?’ He said, ‘Just for fun — Billie Holiday, old jazz from the ’30s.’ I thought maybe we could put together a singing tour.”

Within weeks, Desrosiers found himself in Lhasa’s kitchen, guitar in hand, as they etched out common ground in a range of styles.

“My first thought was, ‘She’s definitely not a jazz singer,’ ” he said. “ ‘She has no training, and it shows. But she has something that can’t be defined, a timbre in her voice that’s more interesting than American jazz.’

“At the end of the afternoon, a woman who had been tanning outside on her balcony came upstairs with a rose and a glass of wine and said, ‘Who’s singing?’ (and offered both to Lhasa). It confirmed the feeling I had, that I was trying to put my finger on — that Lhasa was going to hook people. People loved her on arrival.”

Desrosiers produced, co-wrote and played on Lhasa’s enchanting 1997 debut, La Llorona, sung entirely in Spanish and blending influences of Latin American, klezmer and Middle Eastern music.

Lhasa became a sensation in Quebec and France, winning an ADISQ award and a Juno for best global album, and earning a spot on the Lilith Fair tour.

She and Desrosiers parted ways in 2001. She went on to record two more albums, The Living Road (2003) and Lhasa (2009), before her death from breast cancer in 2010, at the age of 37.

Two decades after the album’s release, Desrosiers returned to the songs of La Llorona this month in Paris, and will do so again at MTelus (formerly Metropolis) on Saturday, as musical director of a tribute concert to the enigmatic singer.

The first half finds Desrosiers and Lhasa’s original band performing La Llorona in its entirety, with guest vocalists Amparo Sánchez, Camélia Jordana and Ana Moura. The second half incorporates songs from the rest of Lhasa’s repertoire, as sung by Patrick Watson, Martha Wainwright, Marie-Pierre Arthur, Katie Moore, Betty Bonifassi and others.

“It’s bizarre to go back and work on those songs without Lhasa,” Desrosiers admitted. “It’s funny to have the same band, creating the same sounds of that album without her singing next to us. For me, it’s like therapy.”

For Patrick Watson, it’s a way to reconnect with an old friend.

“Spending time with Lhasa was like spending time away from the world,” said the singer. “I would be at her place, and time would stop. There was an old feeling at her place — something you can’t find in the world anymore. You’d go have tea or coffee and step outside yourself for a while. I use the words ‘old magic.’ Everyone had patience, all of a sudden, and all the details of life would stick out.”

Watson was an up-and-coming singer when he first saw Lhasa on stage at Lion d’Or in the early 2000s.

“When she sang, I felt like I had met my sister,” he said. “I ran up to talk to her after the show. I was this stupid punk, really hyper, and she was really nice. That’s how our friendship began. I remember I was so nervous when we had coffee for the first time.”

Watson was just one of the people Lhasa’s younger brother Mischa Karam met through his sister when he followed her to Montreal in 2005, after she invited him to join her on tour in Europe.

“Every thread of my life in Montreal can be traced back to her,” said Karam, who works for artist management company Opak Media, which represents Watson, the Barr Brothers, Basia Bulat, Cold Specks and, formerly, Lhasa.

Karam, their mother Alexandra Karam (who moved to Montreal two years ago) and others from his sister’s entourage spearheaded the recent release of Lhasa: Live in Reykjavik, a recording from the last concerts the singer played before her death. Her brother believes it captures her on the brink of artistic evolution.

“It’s a perfect document of a moment in time — of the beginning of what was going to be her new tour, with her new band and her new identity as a songwriter, with her new manner of singing,” he said. “Everything was always changing with Lhasa.

“She was pushing her voice less, and retaining all her emotion for a more natural delivery. I was talking to Joe Grass, who plays on the album, who said a lot of the songs were her singing, and them following her, without a fleshed-out arrangement or plan. They were breathing as one. There’s a quote out there of Lhasa saying, ‘We are all singing, I have the mouth.’

“It’s nice to have something that shows where she was going. It had to end, but it was moving.”

 Lhasa de Sela remembered, on album and in concert. By  T'cha Dunlevy, Montreal Gazette,  December 13, 2017

A little-known friendship between the late Montreal artist Lhasa de Sela and the lead singer for the UK band Tindersticks, Stuart Staples, is hidden in a new track on the band's recent album, The Waiting Room.

He'll never forget the recording session when he was singing Hey Lucinda with Lhasa.

"It's the only time I ever sang with a singer looking each other in the eyes," Staples said.

"We were both kind of reaching to capture a moment inside a song."

It's been nearly a decade since the two collaborated on that duet, but Staples says he waited so long to release it because listening to her voice was too hard after Lhasa's death in 2010 at the age of 37.

"For myself and my wife Suzanne, we lost a great friend," he said.

"So it took a long time, four to five years, to open my ears again to her, to be able to enjoy her musicality and remembering her."

Hey Lucinda is a sad song. 

"It talks about regrets and time running out, but at the time she was really, really healthy and happy," he said.

"We had a great time recording this song."

Staples says it took him years to realize the song just needed a few glockenspiel notes to set off the vocals. 

The band released another duo with Lhasa, Sometimes it hurts, on the 2003 album Waiting for the Moon.

Lhasa de Sela remembered on new track. By  Jeanette Kelly . CBC News , May 6, 2016.

Tindersticks - Hey Lucinda. YouTube

Tindersticks - Sometimes It Hurts. YouTube. 

Singer, Songwriter Lhasa De Sela Dies. Spoken obituary by Vince Pearson.  NPR January 5, 2010. 

The Mexican-American singer-songwriter Lhasa de Sela, who has died aged 37 of breast cancer, created three extraordinary albums over the course of 12 years. She achieved fame more by word of mouth than through the media, but won various awards, including the Québécois Félix in 1997, a Canadian Juno in 1998 and a BBC award for world music in 2005.

The seeds of Lhasa's unusual songwriting lay in the cultural background of her parents and the nomadic lifestyle they had chosen. She was born in a cabin in Big Indian, New York state, the daughter of a Mexican father and American mother who at the time of her birth were hippies. She and her sisters grew up in a converted school bus in which the family crisscrossed North America and Mexico. They were educated at home, learning from books, music and artistic activity. Lhasa's childhood was filled with vivid experiences. Her parents, she felt, taught her to follow the heart, find her own way, be original.

Settling first in San Francisco with her mother when her parents split up, she moved in her late teens to Montreal. She honed her craft singing in bars and began composing songs in three languages. Her three albums, the mostly Spanish La Llorona (1997), the French-Spanish The Living Road (2003) and, in English, Lhasa (2009), were filled with songs fuelled by dreams, love, relationships and life events filtered through an imagination shaped by folk tales.

She formed a duo with Yves Desrosiers and gradually began performing and recording with a close circle of fine musicians, enjoying the creativity inspired by close collaboration. While her music drew on wide-ranging sources, from Mexican ranchera and French chanson to Arabic song, with touches of Americana, it was startlingly original in every way.

Extensive touring with the Canadian all-female music festival Lilith Fair left Lhasa feeling burnt out, and in 1998 she joined Pocheros, her sisters' touring circus, in France. Songs such as Con Toda Palabra and La Marée Haute, written during this time, were windows into an intense inner world. For the circus's clown and tightrope work, Lhasa distilled often surreal images into words which she set to brooding melodies, with loping rhythms that evoked mysterious journeys. Often disconcerting, her songs express a place where imagination and reality meet, and where courage triumphs over fear and darkness. They are 21st-century songs of enchantment.

Life, Lhasa said, was "a road constantly changing and, being on it, you change too". She gained a passionate following in Canada and France, and toured the UK, revelling in an early invitation from the Nottingham pop noir group Tindersticks to work with them. Her fame grew and her songs featured in the television series The Sopranos, a Madonna documentary and Sophie Barthes's 2009 film, Cold Souls.

Last year, Lhasa told me that she was delighted to have arranged and produced her third disc herself, with five musicians rather than 20, recording "as live" on analogue rather than digital tape, and rejoiced in the warmth given to her pared-down arrangements. The album had been recorded before her cancer was diagnosed. When I asked whether its songs were prophetic, she described Rising as a crisis song, its images those of "somebody being caught up by a storm, pulled up into the air, like a wave rising up and down, and rising again. For over a year, I could not make head or tail of it and then it fell into place. The images are violent, even chaotic, but there is something simple and serene there too." Anyone and Everyone, the disc's final, cathartic song, expressed her happiness, she said, "feeling my feet in the earth, having a place in the world, of things taking care of themselves".

Back in 2004, we had discovered inadvertently that I knew the whereabouts of an old friend of her father, who had been feared "disappeared" after the 1973 Chilean coup, and I was able to put them in touch. Lhasa's parents had played a lot of Chilean music during the 1970s and she confessed that, with childish innocence, she had dreamed then of marrying the legendary singer Víctor Jara when she grew up, not understanding what his murder under the Pinochet dictatorship meant until she was much older. Latterly, she spoke of plans to record Jara's songs.

Lhasa is survived by her partner, Ryan, her parents, and nine brothers and sisters.

Lhasa de Sela obituary. By Jan Fairley. The Guardian, January 6, 2010.