A Bit More Detail

When I saw the phrases "Lhasa" and "37" earlier this week, paired earlier this week in a line of news on the Yahoo!Canada front page where I was logging in to check my E-mail on break, I didn't stop long enough to read the full sentence. It was ominous that the name of Canada-based Lhasa de Sela was matched with a number that looked like the age one would announce in an obituary, but could it really? It was; at 37, after a struggle, Lhasa died in her Montréal home of breast cancer.

Her 2003 album The Living Road is one of the most remarkable I've come across, one of the first really new albums that I encountered after I came to Toronto, one of the albums that I'll always use to punctuate my personal biography. News of her cosmopolitanism help attract me to the album, as she's really quite a North American: born to Mexican and American parents in upstate New York, she grew up in a nomadic family and ended up establishing herself in the Montréal café scene in the early 1990s, where her intimate songwriting and throaty singing voice secured her a position first in Québec and then in Canada. That cosmopolitan wouldn't have meant anything if not for her fantastic music, as described in this 2004 Philip Markowitz interview/review.

At the end of 2003, she released her long-anticipated sophomore album, The Living Road, the follow up to her stunning 1997 debut La Llorona. Once again, Lhasa lends her velvety voice to impassioned songs about love and loss.

Lhasa toured extensively after the surprise international success of La Llorona. In concert, Lhasa was by turns both shy and generous, and she gave a lot of herself away to her audiences. When the strain of touring threatened to overwhelm her, she knew she needed a break. Her escape route was waiting. Lhasa ran away to France join a contemporary one-ring circus "Pocheros" created and mounted by her 3 sisters. "When I left to go to France, it was almost like going to my death. I gave away everything. I did everything but shave my head and become a monk!" she laughs. "Afterwards I looked back and thought it was a bit drastic."

In France Lhasa lived a busy nomadic life, embraced by the loving and chaotic extended family the circus provided. "It was amazing. My little niece would wake me up every morning by knocking on my caravan door and she'd climb into my lap and say she loved me. If only touring could always be like that." The 400-seat circus in the round kept her busy "whenever you're not doing something up front, there's something to do behind the scenes, prop changes, costume changes". Lhasa also took time to pursue her visual arts, to eat well and to play. She still sang most nights accompanied by an accordion-wielding trapeze artist, but the spotlight was now on the talents of her whole family, not Lhasa alone.

Feeling refreshed, by 1999 Lhasa began to write new songs. She collaborated with French singer Arthur H, and contributed to a duet on an album by The Tindersticks. Eventually a relationship took her to Marseilles, where Lhasa began to hone the ideas she had gathered on the road and write songs about love and creativity, apocalypse and hope. These are the songs of The Living Road. To the casual listener, The Living Road will seem similar to La Llorona, but a deeper listen reveals many differences between the two albums. La Llorona was a Spanish-only album, The Living Road is sung in three languages: Spanish, French and even Lhasa's first tongue, English (albeit with a lovely French accent acquired on the continent). The band features a broader range of instruments, sometimes bordering on the orchestral. On La Llorona it was difficult to tell where Lhasa's voice ended and Montreal-based guitarist and producer Yves DesRosier's intimate accompaniment began. The two musicians felt like one musical entity living in two bodies. This time out, Lhasa chose producers Francois Lalonde and Jean Masicotte, also of Montreal. Together the three created a lush and spacious studio sound, placing Lhasa's voice above the band rather than mingling it with the instruments (in a few places the band has to be kept at bay for fear of overpowering her fragile-diva sound).

[. . .]

This time, Lhasa isn't giving all of herself away. "The songs are autobiographical for the most part, but sometimes it's easier to stand back and write as if the story is happening to someone else who's just like me, but not me." The songs, though, are still startlingly intimate. "Anywhere On This Road" could be the theme song of the album, dealing as it does with both restlessness and heartbreak. It starts with the sounds of travel footfalls and bicycle bells give way to percussion and trumpet, then Lhasa's voice.

I like her BBC performance of that song.

"TTC subway doors open during bridge crossing" (Watch on YouTube)

And now she's dead. It doesn't seem fair at all, not at the early age of 37 and not after only three albums. Her sentiments in "Anywhere On This Road" do apply to the rest of us, sure:

You've travelled 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

Lhasa set precedents. She will almost certainly be cited by avant-garde musicians as a vital influence for decade. And how little that means, really, without her continued, active presence.

To Lhasa.