Lhasa’s Music Captivated Audiences Everywhere but Here

Montreal’s wide-ranging music scene has been one of its calling cards for decades, with border-crossing success stories like the ambitious rock band Arcade Fire, the arty electro-pop artist Grimes and the renowned post-rock modernists Godspeed You! Black Emperor. Yet one of the musicians most beloved there is the spellbinding Lhasa de Sela, who wrote and sang in English, French and Spanish, but remains largely unknown in the United States.

She was usually referred to simply as Lhasa, and before she died of breast cancer in 2010 at 37, she became a platinum-selling recording artist in Canada, with genre-busting albums that synthesized Romani music, Mexican rancheras, Portuguese fados, Americana, chansons française and South American ballads, marrying them with mystical, romantic and intensely personal lyrics.

In Europe, where Lhasa was a mainstay of the festival circuit, and lived in Marseilles for several years, she became a star on the strength of her intimate performances. But in the United States, where she was born and spent most of her childhood, Lhasa’s multilingual recordings proved too much of a marketing challenge for her American record companies, even after she toured with Sarah McLachlan’s traveling festival, Lilith Fair.

Feist, Calexico, Juana Molina, Silvana Estrada and many other stars will perform in the tribute concerts that will cap this year’s Pop Montreal festival on Sept. 29 and 30. Their homage underscores an enduring love affair between a city and an artist who made just three otherworldly albums, including a last, self-titled album, all in English, that she hoped would finally establish her in her home country.

Bia Krieger, the Brazilian-born, Montreal-based singer who was a friend of Lhasa’s, said, “Iconic is the right word” to describe her. “There’s a circle of people here that cherish her.”

Lhasa is now even woven into the landscape of her old neighborhood, Mile End, which is anchored at its southern end by a huge mural of the singer created by a local artist, Annie Hamel, and, on the north by Parc Lhasa de Sela, a children’s playground the city erected in her memory.