When Lhasa de Sela got tired of the relentless grind of the touring lifestyle, she ran away and joined the circus. Literally. The Montreal singer-songwriter’s 1997 debut album, the haunting La Llorona, won her a Juno Award for Best World Music recording and was critically hailed the world over. But with everything that goes into supporting a successful record, she soon found herself burned out.
So she headed for France, where she and her three sisters traveled in a one-ring circus.
“It was a small circus, a contemporary circus, which means very influenced by theatre and dance and no animals or anything like that,” Lhasa (who goes by her first name as a performer) says over the line from her home in Montreal last week before setting out on tour. “I was on the road a lot even as a child-I lived in a school bus until I was eleven, so I’m used to traveling and adventure.”
It wasn’t so much the touring or even the perils of the music industry that wore her out, Lhasa points out, but rather a need to recharge her creative batteries before returning to music with her second CD, The Living Road.
“I always think about the way people used to live hundreds of years ago,” she explains. “Like if you were a salior, and you went off on a boat to go transport coffee beans to, you know, wherever, you were really out on a limb. You didn’t even know if you were ever going to come back, and people just lived that way before.
“There was this kind of a daring, and I guess I have a need for that kind of adventure in my life. I have a need to feel like I’m not all hooked up and plugged into the system all of the time, and that you can go out on a limb even today. That you can go out into the world without a safety net and live first-hand. That’s what I set out to do, and that whole experience is kind of what the album is all about.”
The Living Road, released last year, is a welcome return to Lhasa’s enigmatic sound-smoky trilingual vocals (she sings in Spanish, French, and English) meet jazzy Latin and gypsy melodies in an otherworldly swirl.
“I wanted the music to tell a story,” she says. “Every little sound on the album tells a story-it’s like a brush stroke. There was a lot of time and thought put into it-anything that sounded like it was musically ‘nice’ but didn’t support the song emotionally or create a kind of image, we didn’t use it. We thought a lot in visual terms on the album-kind of like what colours we wanted it to be, and what the landscape was.”
That imagery extended to the detailed ink drawing on the cover of the CD, created by Lhasa herself, a talented artist in her own right.
“I adore the visual arts, I’m completely crazy about them,” she enthuses. “I will paint and draw in spurts-when I don’t for a while, I always miss it.”
The concept of sketching a thematic image through music runs through The Living Road, with its tales of traveling and relationships. The music sounds almost timeless-while it’s clear that Lhasa’s own adventures played a major part in colouring the songs, she says the title also refers to the winding road we all must walk on.
“It’s like a folktale from Nigeria about the road that used to be a river and then it went underground,” she notes. “But then it’s full of spirits and it’s still alive, basically, and the spirits of the river are all on the road. I love the idea of a ‘living road’-it just brought up so many feelings and images about my own life.”
The songstress is about to go down the long road that is a winter tour-she’ll play some soft-seater dates in Canada, including the beautiful Winter Garden Theatre in Toronto this weekend, before leaving for France. Known for her intimate yet intense live show, Lhasa has been known to move audiences to tears with her densely beautiful performances.
“People sometimes people come up after the show and they cry and they give me a hug,” she says, and I can almost hear her smile on the other end of the line. “In Portugal, people came up after the show and we sort of started looking at each other and we started laughing-it was just kind of giggly. [The show] was just too much to take, and all of a sudden it was incredibly hilarious and we just started to laugh.
When she finally gets off the road, she’ll be back to the business of living life. Travelling to faraway cities may be exciting and creatively fulfilling, but even for this adventurer, home is where the heart is.
“I miss my family, but I go over to Europe often and I tour a lot in France, so for now it’s like a good equilibrium-Montreal is an amazing city, and I appreciate it more and more as I rediscover it all over again.”
Lhasa performs at the Winter Garden Theatre (189 Yonge St.) Saturday, Oct. 23 at 8 pm. Tickets at Ticketmaster and Soundscapes.
