My Startling Discovery: Lhasa De Sela!!!

"Serendipity", thy name is "Erato"!!!
A top enjoyment of mine is reading about one thing and discovering a name or a term unknown to me, looking it up and having a whole new part of the world open up. I was blessed by several good teachers who were excited about learning, couldn't wait to share something new and stunning with someone, and they passed that trait on to me.

A great frustration of mine is to come across something and realize that nobody I know would really care about it. At least the blogs give me a chance to throw these
finds out there to an imagined audience.

Another frustration is when I tell people who or what I have uncovered they give me the ol' "HELLO!!!! WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL THESE YEARS???" look. But new discoveries for me are still exciting.

So the other day I was on line researching "Ghost legends of the Southwest and Mexico", and discovered a myth called "La LLorona" (the crying woman.) Google told me a singer had recorded a CD by that title. Her name was:

Lhasa De Sela!!!

Lhasa de Sela is an American Canadian singer and songwriter who was raised in Mexico and the United States and now lives in Canada.

She started singing in a Greek cafe in San Francisco when she was thirteen. At age nineteen she moved to Montreal and sang for five years in bars, where she developed the material that eventually became her first album, La Llorona, released in 1997. La Llorona, which mixes traditional South American songs with original songs, was strongly influenced by Mexican music, but also Eastern European gypsy music and alternative rock. The album was released by the Montreal independent record label Audiogram and brought her much success, including the Félix Award for "Artiste québécois — musique du monde" in 1997 and the Juno Award for Best Global Artist, in 1998.

After touring in Europe and North America for several years, Lhasa left her singing career in 1999 and moved to France to join her three sisters in a circus/theatre company named Pocheros. She eventually reached Marseille, where she started writing songs again. She then returned to Montreal to produce her second album, The Living Road, which was released in 2003. While La Llorona had been entirely in Spanish, The Living Road included songs in English, French and Spanish.

Here, for your pleasure, are a few of the videos I have found:

"DE CARA A LA PARED" ("Face to the Wall")

Crying,
Face to the wall,
The city goes dark.
Crying:
And there's nothing else.
I'm dying, maybe.
Where are you?


"MY NAME"



"CON TODA PALBRA"

With all words
With all smiles
with all looks
with all caresses
I draw near the water
Drinking your kiss
The light of your face
The light of your body
To love you is a prayer...

(pardon me, while I go shower!!!)

If you're interested here is her WEB SITE.