A cassette forgotten for thirty years, rediscovered by Mischa Karam when he was planning a tribute concert for his older sister. Preserved on the magnetic tape, this voice, plaintive, warm. “This sound!” exclaims Mischa. Her voice. The cassette is the length of an album, it sounds like an album.” This album is called First Recordings. Twelve songs recorded in late winter 1994. In retrospect, the first, but also the last album by Lhasa de Sela and his guitarist, Yves Desrosiers. It will be released Friday, before the stage tribute that the POP Montréal festival will pay him on September 29 and 30. We invited the brother and the friend to delve into their memories.
“Lhasa loved stories of failed love,” says Yves Desrosiers with a smile. “She often said that in our first shows: ‘This is a song of failed love.’ She loved songs of impossible love, like the one between Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera.”
Listen again to the songs of First Recordingspublished by Audiogram, takes him back to those first shows: it’s raw, dazzling, passionate. “How do I find my guitar playing? Correct, Yves decides. Of course, I listen to it again and say to myself: “Yeah, I would play that better today”. At that time, I was coming out of a rock’n’roll phase with Jean Leloup [et la Sale affaire]I was embarking on a new story, as much as Lhasa was entering into his story as an interpreter and artist.
From this album recorded in three days in this small garage in Saint-Colomban converted by sound engineer friends into a sixteen-track studio, a demo was presented as a business card to the owners of bars in the metropolis in the hope that concerts could be given there. A few copies of this cassette circulated, but the idea of making an album took several decades to germinate.
“There are now two posthumous albums,” Mischa points out, recalling the Live in Reykjavikreleased in 2017. “They show the very beginning, then the end, the two parts of her trajectory that had not been documented.” This early recording moves us, first because we hear Lhasa again, then because by closing our eyes, we can imagine her moving in the studio, we hear her move away from the microphone when she pushes the note to come closer to it and gently finish her sentence – or, to use Desrosiers’ words: “We hear the room. Normally, it shouldn’t, but it was part of the imperfections of the recording of the time, which annoy me a little… But around me, we also like this sound, so much the better! ” The guitarist is demanding: the sound of this album is of remarkable quality.
It would have been easy to add new tracks, a bass, percussion, a bit of strings, to dress up the voice and the guitar, but the keeper of the master tapes (on four-track cassette!) didn’t want it: “All I have left of this story is precisely this memory,” explains Desrosiers. This recording is precious to me. It shows the energy we had, at that time, at the age we were — I think Lhasa was 22 or 23. I was 32. I was still a kid at 32. The energy we had, I feel it when I listen to this again — there was no question of playing in these recordings, it would have been an affront to Lhasa.”
A guitar, a voice, and this repertoire that the pair used to perform at L’Barouf or at Bobards, among other intimate show bars of the bohemian Plateau of yesteryear. A few jazz standards, I Cover the Waterfront, Good Morning Heartache And Willow Weep for Mepopularized (in particular) by Billie Holiday, especially the immortals of the Mexican and Latin American song repertoire that Desrosiers did not yet know and some of which (Despondent And The Fish) will be re-recorded for Lhasa’s debut album.
“Lhasa was summarizing the story of these songs to me, I understood that it was always very dramatic,” says the guitarist. When I finally spoke a little bit of spanishI listened to these songs again in a different way — and, holy cow !, so it was really intense!”
Mischa: “The first song on the album [El Cosechero, popularisée par l’icône argentine Mercedes Sosa]it was my favorite, we always listened to it at home. Even as a child, Lhasa was playing characters; at four years old, she was doing theater in the living room, she was always singing, she loved drama and archetypes — that was it The Llorona », which, before being the title of Lhasa de Sela’s first album (produced by Desrosiers in 1997), is the name of a legendary character from Latin folklore and a traditional song popularized by the Mexican singer Chavela Vargas (1919-2012), a major influence on Lhasa, the apprentice performer.
First Recordingsaccording to the guitarist, bears witness to the moment “when our repertoire was beginning to be refined, when Lhasa was beginning to find her personality as a singer. What we hear is her realizing that this is what she will do with her life. You hear her searching for herself, perfecting her interpretations, you hear all that on the tape. You also hear our era, our kind of urgency to express ourselves, each on our own and for different reasons, the urgency that we both felt at the same time.”
Why is this album coming out now? Because it was ready, Mischa and Yves simply answer. “Lhasa wasn’t very keen on anniversaries or commemorations,” Mischa adds. The 1er Next January will mark fifteen years since his death, caused by cancer. September 27 would have been his 52e birthday; it will be a bit of a celebration at the Rialto Theatre on September 29 and 30, during the tribute concert The Road Sings bringing together an impressive family of musicians including Feist, Klô Pelgag, Calexico, the Barr Brothers, Helena Deland, La Force, Myriam Gendron, Laurence-Anne, Adèle Trottier-Rivard (Bibi Club), and of course Yves Desrosiers. “We continue to listen to her music,” says Mischa, “I even think that interest in her work is greater today. Young musicians are inspired by what she recorded. All of this, the concert, the album, serves to remind us of her.”
“I certainly had questions about this album project,” Desrosiers admits. “It belonged to her and me, except that I stayed. I imagined asking her: “Do you agree that I release these recordings again?” People around me told me that it would please her fans. Then, to close the subject, I asked Lousnak, her good friend, who designed the album cover. “Is it okay to release this?” She replied: “Obviously, when she was alive, she wouldn’t have released it, but posthumously, yes.” So, okay, let’s release it. It’s true that it’s nice to hear these songs.”