She sang true because she sang only for herself. It was with a radical self-centeredness that Lhasa would retreat into herself, continuously digging a hole of loneliness only to find us all there. Born in a remote city of the state of New York at the beginning of the seventies, she spent her childhood roaming North America in a converted school bus, home of a Mexican writer, a Jewish photographer, four girls, three cats, a parrot, two tortoises and a dog. The absence of television, electricity, current water and telephone was made up for by long hours of reading and improvised night shows. This experience would mark forever the life and the work of this artist, who never lost her nomadic vocation, despite settling down in Montreal at the age of 19. Her name might have been inspired by her taste for sad music; music as distressing at times as the cold streets of the Tibetan capital but always charged with spirituality and a certain serenity, like a walk in the night throughout these same desert streets in Lhasa. Her deep and dark voice would take the breath away like a stranger putting a razor blade to our throat in a dark alleyway. Her music was just like that. It would assault us by surprise and make us bleed slowly every time her vocal chords would stab. It did not really matter whether her songs were rancheras, country, gypsy music or French chanson because she went much further than singing in Spanish, English or French. Languages and melodies were only universal conventions Lhasa resorted to in order to share with us the deep sensitivity of a radical artist: someone who suffered and yearned for more suffering just to reach happiness.
Sadly, Lhasa de Sela passed away on January the 1st, after 2 years of fighting breast cancer. She was 37 and had released 3 fantastic albums.
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