Lhasa de Sela

Lhasa is of Mexican and Jewish -Lebanese-American descent. She was born in Big Indian, New York, and grew up in the United States and Mexico. She started singing in a Greek cafe in San Francisco when she was thirteen. At age nineteen she moved to Montréal and she started singing in bars, where she developed the material she used in her first album, La Llorona, released in 1998. La Llorona, which mixes everything from traditional Mexican music to klezmer to alternative rock, brought success and fame to Lhasa, 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, Lhasa left her singing career in 1999 and moved to France to join her three sisters in a circus act. 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 in Spanish, The Living Road included songs in English, French and Spanish. She was a guest singer on the Tindersticks' track 'Sometimes It Hurts' off their Waiting for the Moon album, and later joined Tindersticks' singer Stuart Staples for a duet on the track 'That Leaving Feeling', found on his Leaving Songs album. Lhasa received the BBC World Music Award for Best Artist of the Americas in 2005.