Biographer Fred Goodman Remembers Lhasa de Sela

An artist in every sense of the word, Lhasa de Sela wowed audiences around the globe with her multilingual songs and spellbinding performances, mixing together everything from Gypsy music to Mexican rancheras, Americana and jazz, chanson française, and South American folk melodies. Tracing de Sela’s unconventional life and introducing her to a new generation, Fred Goodman's book Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is the first biography of this sophisticated creative icon.

Lhasa de Sela was born on September 27, 1972, and on the anniversary of her birth, biographer Fred Goodman pays tribute to her and her legacy, revealing the ways her unorthodox life shaped her creativity. Following Fred Goodman's tribute is his curated playlist that serves as a musical introduction to America's first world music chanteuse [ Spotify | YouTube ]. Why Lhasa de Sela Matters is the latest book in our Music Matters series and publishes November 11, 2019.

Remembering Lhasa de Sela

By Fred Goodman

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The singular, otherworldly American singer Lhasa de Sela—who wrote and recorded in Spanish, French, and English and performed songs in nearly a dozen other languages—would have turned forty-seven on September 27. A spiritual and artistic pilgrim, she possessed an insatiable hunger for knowledge and left behind a musical legacy culled from her unique affinity for the romantic, mystic, and cerebral.

Beginning with her first album in 1997, Lhasa’s multilingual songs and her spellbinding shows made the singer-songwriter a sensation in Montreal and Europe. But even today, nearly ten years after her death, her work and individuality have yet to register with listeners in her homeland. Contradictory and complex, Lhasa was both a naïf and a melancholic, a pixie with an enduring apprehension of life’s hardships as well as its magic. In the course of a heartbreakingly brief career of just thirteen years and three albums, she worked her own musical turf, part Edith Piaf, part Tinkerbell.

She came by her artistic and spiritual wanderlust honestly. Raised in a family of bohemian nomads, Lhasa was born in an unused Catskills Mountains ski chalet in Big Indian, New York, twenty-five miles northwest of Woodstock. The attending hippie doctor, shirtless and in overalls, focused most of his medical supervision on splitting a gallon of Gallo burgundy with the expectant mother. Beautiful and healthy, the as-yet unnamed baby was wrapped in a blanket; with no cradle to hand, she slept in a dresser drawer.

Her peripatetic life began just a few days later, when the family was kicked out of Big Indian and set off for Mexico. But it wasn’t until five months later that her parents finally found a name they felt suited their new daughter. Having read Timothy Leary’s popular handbook on LSD, The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the couple then tackled the original Buddhist tome that had inspired Leary. Along with providing a spiritual guide to navigating bardo, the state in which a Buddhist’s consciousness sits suspended between death and rebirth, the book told of the holy city of Lhasa, built high on the Tibetan plateau. The name means “place of the gods,” and somehow, those rarified heights and aspirations felt like an appropriate christening and wish.

“They were incapable of having a middle-class life,” Lhasa de Sela would say years later when asked about her mother and father. “Their parents were well-off, but they were the black sheep of their families. They took a lot of hallucinogenic drugs and took incredible risks.”

Raised in a converted school bus crossing back and forth between Mexico and the United States, Lhasa and her three sisters were homeschooled and grew up without a telephone or television. And while their parents rejected the bulk of mainstream America’s material and social assumptions, they were fierce about instilling in their children an unquenchable curiosity, a deep devotion to spiritual and intellectual advancement, and the veneration of creativity.

“What was really passed to us in the way we were raised is that life is an interior search,” says her sister Miriam. “A lot of soul-searching and trying to be truthful to your intuition. And in a very vague way trying to trust something that’s invisible. I would have to say that was a huge part of Lhasa’s life: constant self-searching.” That spiritual and intellectual search would, in turn, illuminate her writings and performances.

An exhilarating childhood, it was also a life of uncertainty, isolated and lived without nets. The month that Lhasa turned eight, she was living in a broken-down bus behind an Exxon station in Elk Grove, California. Her father was picking melons by day and rebuilding a replacement engine salvaged from a junkyard by night; Lhasa and her sisters studied with their mother in the mornings and worked gathering tomatoes in the afternoons. On her birthday, there was a Raggedy Ann party in the bus; Lhasa’s mother made a doll, her sisters crafted a piñata, and friends provided a Raggedy Ann cake. As an adult, Lhasa would tag it her most memorable birthday.

Though lived close to the bone, that unorthodox upbringing proved a petri dish for nurturing a family of extraordinarily focused iconoclasts and autodidacts. Lhasa’s sisters would go on to careers as circus performers—a tightrope walker, a trapeze artist, and a gymnast—with Lhasa at one point taking a break from her own career to join their circus troupe in France. A loner at heart, Lhasa would always remain somewhat estranged from society at large; her unusual upbringing and the lessons imparted by her parents—particularly, that life is an adventure not to be missed—left her unable to fathom the lack of curiosity and discipline in so many of the people she met. “She kind of fit in everywhere but also nowhere,” says her half-brother, Mischa Karam.

At the age of twelve, Lhasa heard Billie Holiday for the first time and became obsessed with transforming herself into a singer. A move at nineteen to Montreal, with its thriving dual French and English music scenes, broadened her perspective. Lhasa’s unique ability to incorporate whatever came her way, forged in that unlikely, supercharged childhood, would lead her as a musician to make use of anything she deemed moving and meaningful, from Gypsy music to Mexican rancheras, Americana, jazz and fado, chanson française and South American folk melodies. She had an eye for the authentic, an unfailing ear for the heartfelt.

Though she was likely this country’s first world music chanteuse, Lhasa nonetheless remains virtually unknown in the United States. In recent years, reggaetón and Spanglish pop hits such as “Despacito” have worked their way into America’s pop lexicon, but that wasn’t the case twenty-odd years ago, when Lhasa released her first album, the all-Spanish La Llorona. A musical séance calling up ghosts from a long-lost world of legend and romance, the album became a bestseller in Canada and made her a star in France and much of Europe but never registered here. Her trilingual second album, The Living Road, was one of the United Kingdom’s most critically lauded albums of 2003, and critics there acclaimed Lhasa “a multilingual global diva.” Her continuing American anonymity feels inexplicable. “The language really did not make any difference,” observed the Canadian music journalist Nicholas Jennings. “What she was putting forth transcended language, she was such an intense performer. She had all the depth of emotion of an actress or an opera singer. You couldn’t take your eyes off her.”

As ambitious as she was artistic, Lhasa had set her eyes on conquering the United States. She didn’t imagine her time was running short. Diagnosed with breast cancer in 2008, Lhasa nonetheless continued to plot an American tour while writing and recording her only all-English album, 2009’s Lhasa. But for Lhasa, America would prove a dream that has yet to come to fruition: she died at her home in Montreal on New Year’s Day, 2010, at the age of thirty-seven.

About the author: Fred Goodman is a former editor at Rolling Stone whose work has appeared in the New York Times and many magazines. His previous books include the award-winning The Mansion on the Hill: Dylan, Young, Geffen, Springsteen, and the Head-on Collision of Rock and Commerce.

Spotify Playlist | YouTube Playlist

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Aretha Franklin, the Beach Boys, and the Lord’s Prayer

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By Tom Smucker, author of Why the Beach Boys Matter

Every Sunday at my church we recite the Lord’s Prayer. With minor variations, it’s the most commonly shared liturgy across Christianity and the most familiar direct quote from Jesus in the Bible. It’s also the only lyric recorded by both the greatest vocalist of my generation, Aretha Franklin, and my favorite pop group, the Beach Boys.

Aretha’s voice is such a vast container that her first syllable, “our” sums up all the blues, struggle, faith, and triumph explored in the rest of “The Lord’s Prayer” track from her 1987 live gospel album, One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism. This is the product of skill and musicianship, of course, but it’s something more. Aretha’s singing voice was unique, and when she chose to she could call upon a richness and depth that could sum up the entire history of American music, and to my ears, the entire history of America itself, in one syllable.

So begins this musical prayer, but Aretha is soon at work pulling the phrases apart, altering pitch, timbre, volume, and phrasing, looking for meanings and building the drama. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” through recitation and repetition, has settled into many a Christian’s consciousness as nothing more than a nicely balanced couplet, but Aretha lands on the word “will” and embellishes and repeats the transitional “as” demonstrating a master class of gospel music improvisations, making the earthly struggle for heavenly righteousness a human desire that cannot be taken for granted or ignored. “As it is in heaven” has been reconfigured from a pleasant reassurance to a desperate—and successful—existential search for transcendence.

A similar drama is built into the debtors/sins/trespasses couplet. Aretha lingers on the transitional “who” in “who trespass against us,” pulling an ongoing confrontation with the demonic into the center of this prayer, and again, to my ears, making this King James translation from the book of Matthew a profoundly African American, and therefore American, prayer.

The tension builds as we get to “deliver,” repeated three times, three different ways, before she sings the whole phrase “deliver us from evil.” It is as if Aretha and the choir are moving us out of Egypt to the edge of the Red Sea. When they get to “glory” and the “for” in “forever,” the waters are parting, and we are crossing to a place beyond goose bumps, maybe beyond words, where faith is an achievement wrestled from despair. Aretha, the choir, the song, and the prayer stay at this mountaintop of emotion and spirituality and musical chops for a while, and then settle us back down to earth at the end, a descent that requires at least two Amens.

The Beach Boys’ version of “The Lord’s Prayer” first appeared on the flip side of their Christmas 1963 hit single, “Little Saint Nick,” but it did not reappear on an album until 1983 and, as far as I know, has never been performed in public. Before the era of the CD box set and internet-connected collectors, it was nearly impossible to locate. Back in 1972, when I wrote a two-part article about the Beach Boys for Creem magazine, I had never heard it. Now easily streamed, it maintains its reputation as the high point of Beach Boys acapella harmony, matched only by the wordless vocals of “Our Prayer” from Smile and their sentimental concert staple “Their Hearts Were Full of Spring.”

Recorded in November 1963 shortly before the JFK assassination, and released with “Saint Nick” shortly after that event, this “The Lord’s Prayer” captures a confident New Frontier piety laced with a wistful Beach Boys suggestion that something might be slipping away. Moving around inside the melody, the harmony explores a sophistication, sincerity, and depth in what might otherwise strike some as smug midcentury Caucasian Christianity.

Here Brian Wilson has arrived as the master composer of complex five-part harmony with the Boys as master singers. Drawing from doo wop, pop jazz, girl groups, and mainstream Protestant congregational hymn singing, the Beach Boys musical vocabulary was in place by the time the “Saint Nick/Lord’s Prayer” single was released. For them, a lyric is emphasized when the highest voice in the harmony, most likely Brian, goes even higher, into an expressive falsetto. That peak is reached on the “forgive” of “forgive us our debts.”

In the later, countercultural 1960s, seeking forgiveness may have sounded like a guilt trip sprung by organized religion, but I prefer to hear their 1963 prayer in the context of Aretha Franklin’s version from 1983, hear the white church of New Frontier, Los Angeles suburbia through the music of African American, Reagan-era Detroit. Same prayer, same lyrics, different emphasis. One on forgiveness, the other on deliverance, to my American ears, two pieces of one social, political, religious, racial, and musical puzzle.

Aretha’s first live gospel album, Amazing Grace, recorded in Los Angeles in 1973, was a concert and a celebration from the peak of her cultural power and sold two million copies. One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, recorded ten years later back in Detroit, post-civil rights, pre-Obama, is a church service and was not a commercial success. A people and a city are under attack, and the long night of de-industrialization is settling across the rust belt, but Aretha celebrates and calls upon the rich legacy and resources of African American spirituality and politics: preachers, politicians, and other gospel singers and musicians.

Unique, it seems to me, among American pop stars, Aretha was able to cross back and forth between secular soul and sacred gospel without incurring the disproval of the saved or the disdain of the defrocked. This says a lot about the breadth of her artistry and the political, religious, and musical pedigree of her family, but it also speaks to the social flexibility inside much of American Black Christianity.

The Beach Boys didn’t inherit a similar institution. The white Protestant Christianity they grew up in proved too brittle to maintain its utility through the turbulence of the next twenty years. But they extracted a valuable resource from this inheritance, the deployment of a wordless vocal chorale that added dignity, maybe even transcendence, maybe love and mercy, to everything from teenage songs about cars to songs about growing old and summer coming to an end. “The Lord’s Prayer” without words, so to speak, would prove to be a piece of white middle-class, midcentury Protestantism applicable to the larger pop culture of the last fifty-plus years, and a recognizable part of the Beach Boys musical signature.

Removed from this religious inheritance, their music, especially their lyrics, can sometimes be misunderstood as simple-minded, shallow, too optimistic. Heard in full, however, they can remind us that an average life contains the sacred and that great art can help us hear that. From different but not disconnected traditions, Aretha Franklin and the Beach Boys draw us towards that wisdom.

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Beach Boys Obscurities, a Playlist by Tom Smucker

Spotify Playlist: Beach Boys Obscurities

for Why the Beach Boys Matter by Tom Smucker

Fifty plus years on, it’s easy to catch the big hits and classic cuts associated with the Beach Boys. But some of the tracks and session outtakes that have received less attention can also add insight into the influences and influence of the greatest American white pop group of the last half of the twentieth century.

Surfin’ An early studio attempt at what became their first release on the independent Candix label, simple acoustic white doo-wop that stumbled upon a metaphoric gold mine—surfing. Postwar lower middle-class suburbia may have been racially segregated, but the airwaves were not, particularly in cities like Los Angeles and New York, where white teenagers could listen to black R & B. Jan and Dean and the Beach Boys were listening and soon collaborating with each other, and with Brian Wilson’s help, Jan and Dean produced the first surfing song to hit the top of the charts, “Surf City.” The origin of this explosion was doo-wop.

Surfers Rule It’s all in place here with the solos, the harmony chorus, the surf guitar breaks, and the over-the-top ecstatic falsetto borrowed from Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons, acknowledged in the last half minute. The Beach Boys would make this falsetto a part of their own musical signature, most famously at the end of “Fun, Fun, Fun.” But Frankie was first.

The Lord’s Prayer The flip side of the “Little Saint Nick” Christmas single, unavailable on an album for twenty years. This song marks the high point of Beach Boys acapella harmony singing and is the tip-off that their vocal inspiration came not only from doo-wop and pop jazz, like the Four Freshmen, but also from midcentury middle American Protestant congregational hymnody. Minus the lyrics, this essential musical reference would reappear throughout their career, most obviously on “Our Prayer” from Smile, first released on the 20/20 album.

In the Parkin’ Lot Here that wordless, post-Christian Christianity frames and thereby dignifies a song about making out in your car before school. Some lyrical interpretation for non-boomers: The couplet “here comes the news/ there’s no time to lose” refers to the format of Top 40 radio in the early 1960s. Obligated by regulation, stations would commonly break for five minutes of news before the hour. So when you heard the news come on, you had five minutes before the bell rang at the start of school.

There’s No Other Like My Baby Like the Beatles, the Beach Boys can be understood as a male girl group, appropriating traditionally feminine-at-the-time attitudes towards romantic idealization, vulnerability, and self-worth. This is a studio outtake from the Party sessions, as they work through the Crystals hit.

Don’t Talk String Overdub Pet Sounds was so dense it put off some listeners, but it pulled in others. Just one little layer here of string-section heaven. For those who got pulled in, dismantling the density on Pet Sounds Sessions turned out to be a moneymaker for Capitol Records in the long run.

Let’s Go Away for Awhile Brian Wilson and his accomplices could quote classical music on Pet Sounds (see preceding track), but the real heart of his genius was the ability to fuse the profound, shallow, vulgar, sentimental, and dramatic on this one instrumental. And oh, the chord changes!

Wind Chimes When I want some perfectly executed, stoner, hippie, late 1960s, Southern Californian pop, my first choice is always something from Smiley Smile, and this is only one example.

You’re Welcome A Smile snippet, the B side of the “Heroes and Villains” single, an oddball, upbeat, minimalist, nearly acapella, vocal harmony gem.

Think About the Days Brian relies on a wordless “Our Prayer”–style harmony vocal to open the 50th anniversary reunion CD That’s Why God Made the Radio.

Pacific Coast Highway Then he sets up the conclusion of the album with this short bit about driving alone in his car along the California coast, watching the sun set over the ocean.

Summer’s Gone The Beach Boys’ most sustainable, reusable metaphor—summer—is refashioned as an autumnal acceptance of the winding down of a career, and perhaps a life. Turn up the volume at the end to hear the waves lapping on the beach.

Guess You Had to Be There Brian teams up with talented young Country star Kacey Musgraves to sing about one wild weekend or Brian’s entire late 1960s biography or both. To my ears, this is the first time a Beach Boy has successfully incorporated Country instrumentation and sentiment into a Beach Boys song. Something new.

Dirty Computer Afropunk goddess Janelle Monae samples Brian and his wordless harmony backgrounds to set the tone on her opening track. Further proof that he is moving from being remembered as chronicler of a specific time and place to an innovator and contributor to pop music as a whole.

Summer in Paradise Meanwhile, the lackluster title track from the out-of-print CD by the Mike Love–led Beach Boys touring band got reworked in concert, and a UK release with an additional verse, probably by Roger McGuinn of the Byrds, became a high point of the Mike Love Beach Boys set list. This live version churns along neatly tying together the Beach Boys idyllic portraits of summers past with a plea for environmental justice. Mike’s Chuck Berry–inspired feel for word play propels the verses leading up to Bruce Johnston’s energized contribution to McGuinn’s verse. Make America Great Again, fight climate change.

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