Lhasa: Connection and Creation
Where does Lhasa fit in? 
Critics have tried to classify singer/songwriter Lhasa de Sela’s work since she burst on the scene in 1997 with her first album, La Llorona. Gypsy-influenced, with touches of flamenco, rock, jazz, soul, and electronica, her moody, evocative singing recalls the old-world charm of Billie Holiday with the new-world sensibility of Lila Downs. Her latest release, simply titled Lhasa, is a conscious break from those labels of the past. Simple, stripped-down, with traditional arrangements and Lhasa musing openly on love, loss, and identity, the album is also notable for the way it was recorded. Done live-to-tape, Lhasa –as she’s commonly known –says she’d long wanted to record in an old-school way.
“I’d been wanting to do that,” she says, “It was just a case of getting the nerve up to do it.” She notes that the current musical climate, with its ease of downloading and electronic, in-your-basement mixing, has lead to a certain kind of terror when it comes to playing and recording instruments live. “There’s no real reason why that should be so. Suddenly everyone’s scared of recording live, but most of best albums were recorded that way.” She pauses. “I guess it does take a lot of confidence.”
Confidence is definitely a quality that’s been bred into Lhasa. From her time growing up as the daughter of itinerant hippie parents, she and her siblings were encouraged to be creative and inventive. In some cases, the family’s here-today-gone-tomorrow lifestyle necessitated it. She, along with her three sisters, Mexican father and American mother, drove around the continent in a converted school bus; she began singing when she was thirteen, and at nineteen, moved to Montreal, where she lived for the next five years. She won a Juno in 1998 for La Llorona, then moved to France in 1999, to join her sisters in the circus group they work with. Her second album, The Living Road, came out in 2003, and had a mix of Spanish, French, and English songs.
With her latest release, Lhasa embraces an earthy approach, one at once more personal and yet more inclusive. The fact it’s self-titled tells you something about not only the singer/songwriter’s confidence, but about where she finds herself within the modern world of computer-oriented composing. With its stripped-down sound and acoustic style, Lhasa could be considered a reaction against the electronic world.
“Well, I’m realizing there are other ways to do it,” she says of songwriting. “I started recording albums when it was digital –but before ProTools and stuff –and yet most of the music I love was recorded before that age.” Lhasa cites the records of soul favourites Al Green and Sam Cooke as influences. The process of using analogue is more conducive to human relating, she feels, and that’s something that comes across to listeners. “You’re ready to make music (when recording), and not just make music alone, but with other people. You’ve worked with them, built relationships, now you’re ready to get together and play, whereas with computer programs, sometimes people don’t meet each other. Music is all about relationships.”
Those relationships and connections are keenly felt on Lhasa, where the intimate interactions of instruments hum through a din of soft murmurs, like on the track “Where Do You Go?” with Lhasa’s haunting vocal floating above a sonorous blend of harp, guitar, and keyboards. So too is the connection between musicians apparent on the gorgeously spare, haunting “1001 Nights” with the singer breathily channeling a modern-day Sheherazade planning her escape, against a North African-style strummed electric guitar in the background.
Some songs presented surprises once they were brought into the studio. The recording of the 50s-sounding, slow-rockabilly-esque song “Love Came Here” presented a unique opportunity; the studio engineer found a way to record the drum tracks “so they sounded big and amazing”, says the singer. “All of a sudden, wow… it was so inspiring. It made everybody play differently. Also, the bass player decided to take a bass that wasn’t his own –he has a refined bass, but he took this other bass that had a clacky sound –and the mix of that with the drum sound got us into this state. You can hear me laughing at the end… like, ‘Wow, what happened?’ And that was our first take!”
While not all the songs on Lhasa are recordings done on the first take, they all possess a fresh vibrancy and a certain in-the-moment urgency that perfectly captures the energy between the Montreal-based singer/songwriter and her team. Figuring out the album order was another task in itself, though. The album has a distinct narrative order –of woman finding love, losing love, questioning existence and identity, and ultimately finding a sense of liberation that comes not from external circumstances or figures, but from a deep sense of inner peace. Still, it was a struggle initially to figure it all out. “It’s always quite a puzzle figuring our the order for me,” she admits, “especially the last song. It’s very important, because … the other songs are all about searching and yearning, and finding a place, and the last song, yes, there is a place, feeling of being okay in the world, feeling like you’re every place in the world. Don’t we all want that?”
The visual elements of the album were just as important to Lhasa as the music. “They seem to be extremely compatible,” she says of the music-and-art marriage. “I keep finding out that musical artists that I love are also visual artists, and it seems more and more there’s something that really goes together. In a way, I’m not surprised. Music is an art that requires an audience, and requires getting an instant reaction. There’s a whole kind of freedom in painting and doing visual art that is a relief for those who perform a lot –to not expect a reaction, to be in a room creating and just do something because it feels right to you. There’s something liberating about not being in front of an audience, for somebody who’s used to being creative and wants to continue to be even when they don’t have a show. You can’t be seen onstage all the time.”
She sums up the art/music relationship nicely: “Music is a conversation; art is to please yourself.”
Still, she manages to balance both arts nicely. Her dislike of over-editing and meticulous, computer-enhanced perfecting that’s become part of the auto-tuned music industry extends itself to live work. “I’ve been noting the beauty of awkwardness,” she remarks. “When I see performers and they’re too smooth and there’s no rough edges, I get this feeing like they’re in a bubble and I can’t reach them.”
With a tour of Europe and North American imminent, Lhasa is quick to stress the importance of human connection. “I’m starting to really love to see people who are awkward. I love that. I love it when people don’t know what to say. If you want perfect, you’ll sacrifice beauty.”
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