Have songs, will travel

Lhasa De Sela's debut album, La Llorona, was one of those records that make a huge international splash but whose ripples fizzle out somewhere in the English Channel. Recorded in 1996 in a Montreal kitchen, it was a multi-platinum hit in France and Canada, but under the pressure of her unexpected success, Lhasa chose to run away and join a circus.

Lhasa De Sela's debut album, La Llorona, was one of those records that make a huge international splash but whose ripples fizzle out somewhere in the English Channel. Recorded in 1996 in a Montreal kitchen, it was a multi-platinum hit in France and Canada, but under the pressure of her unexpected success, Lhasa chose to run away and join a circus.

"It sounds like a pretty crazy thing to do, I know," the singer acknowledges, "but it was very different. Touring for music is hotel rooms. Touring for circus, it takes two days just to put up the tent, and you stay in town for at least a week. And it's a family life, it's a whole life."

Lhasa's name may sound Tibetan, her first album was in Spanish, and she has been most popular in French-speaking countries, but she was born in New York State, and spent her childhood between New England, Mexico and California, living in a big bus with her parents and sisters before moving to Canada at 19.

Lhasa's new album, The Living Road, takes travelling as its theme. "Life is a living road," she explains, "a road that's constantly changing, and that changes you. Just by being on it, it changes you." Yet she denies that she is celebrating carefree rootlessness: "The album is kind of sad!" The songs, three in French, four in English, and five in Spanish, recount imperfect love stories, and view travelling as constant abandonment as much as constant discovery. "When you've travelled this long, you just have to go on/ and you don't even look back to see how far you've come," is the lament in "Anywhere on this Road". Lhasa sings in a deep, smoky voice - few singers extract as much feeling from consonants.

The arrangements on The Living Road sound less Latin than those on La Llorona; Lhasa cites influences as diverse as Edith Piaf, The Staple Singers and Radiohead. All three are clearly discernable on her recordings, which combine simple guitar and piano backing with strings and elaborate percussion arrangements. Lhasa insists the polyglottery is not a bid to widen her audience: "Songs just arrive. An idea for a song has a mood, and the mood already has its language."

While the English lyrics tend to be the most direct and personal, the French words play around with witty rhymes. Lhasa's Spanish, meanwhile, is full of oblique imagery that can at times sound rather self-consciously poetic. "I speak Spanish a couple of times a week", she explains, "but I speak English and French all the time. And humour has so much to do with daily life, and having that quickness of spirit - I don't have that in Spanish."

Rootlessness and travel have been the keynotes of Lhasa's life and work but she is far from romanticising the "tune in, drop out" attitude. "To think that that will solve your problems is an illusion, like thinking that love will solve all your problems, or that moving to another country will solve all your problems. Of course, it's an illusion; an illusion that life will take great pleasure in destroying for every single one of us."

Lhasa plays the Jazz Café, London NW1 tomorrow (020-7916 6060); 'The Living Road' is out now on Warner Jazz