by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Six years ago, Montreal-based singer/songwriter Lhasa de Sela made a massive mark with her Juno-winning, Spanish-language debut La Llorona, a marvellous, melancholic nod to her Mexican background and a magnificent showcase for her rich, full-bodied vocals. The worldbeat press went wild, Europe went bonkers, Lhasa went on tour - and then went AWOL.

This year's overdue The Living Road springs from that rather footloose downtime and from her history of displacement - Lhasa's childhood was spent wandering this continent in the bus of her itinerant-artist family, with whom she'd reunite after La Llorona. The Mirror located Lhasa in Paris, sitting still long enough for a chat about flowers, bees and singing dogs.

Mirror: I was trying to think of words to describe The Living Road and its theme of the nomadic personality and its joys and pains. One that came to me, but that I found troubling, was rootlessness. It presupposes that roots must have a specific physical place to put down. To someone like yourself, who has known a nomadic life since childhood, what do the words roots and rootlessness mean?

Lhasa de Sela: That's a question I ask myself sometimes. Over the years I have learned to live in a way where I don't have to choose anymore what my roots are. I feel more like, I have things to do and I go where my life takes me, where I can do the things I want to do. My road, in a way, is my roots. Also, the people that I love, and this has become very clear over the years. I have uprooted myself over and over again. The reason I never go back to Mexico is, I don't really know anyone there anymore. I don't have any family there anymore. But the places where there are people that I love, those places stay in my life and become a home for me too.

M: Without nomadic personalities like yours, human communities would simply build walls, not bridges. The wanderers are the ones who build those links, but at the same time I don't want to fault those who remain rooted in the same place. They're the ones who define that place, who give its particular character and history.

LdS: It's like flowers and bees, you know? The flowers have to stay put and the bees get to go around, taking sugar from all the different flowers. I get to be a bee! (laughing) I was just thinking, travelling in Europe is an amazing thing because there are no borders anymore, so you're just travelling along the road and all of the sudden, you're in a different country. You get out of the car and people are speaking a different language. You immediately feel that the culture's different, even if it's just between Belgium and Germany, where the people look kind of the same, all white and European and everything. It made me realize how there's history there, how people fought for that territory, for those lines to be drawn and to preserve their identities in those places.

Canine cantatas

M: When you took your long break, you'd joined your sisters' circus Pocheros - is that the correct pronunciation?

LdS: It's poh-sher-oss, because it's a play on words. Peau, chair, os - skin, flesh and bone. My sisters have been circus performers for a long time, and I always felt that wasn't really my world. I would visit them often in their various circuses, and it's an amazing world, very different from anything else. When I needed a break from music, it just happened that my sisters were finishing a project and we were all free at the same time. So we put together a show, with a circus tent and bleachers and trailers. I sang mostly, but I also did some theatre and rhythm games and stuff like that.

M: This was a contemporary circus -

LdS: A contemporary circus, no animals. Actually, there was a singing dog. There are certain dogs that sing whenever someone plays an accordion or a harmonica. There's something in the frequencies. So all you had to do was play this one piece on the accordion and she'd start to sing.

M: Wow. Any chance of Pocheros coming to Montreal?

LdS: That show's done now, but my sisters are working in a new show that's really beautiful and I'd love it if they could come to Montreal, because I think people would really appreciate it. People in Montreal haven't seen that much contemporary circus, weirdly enough, because Cirque du Soleil kind of monopolizes that.

At le Spectrum on Friday, April 30 and Saturday, May 1, 8pm, $32.50

>> Music Listings