ABSTRACT
Lula Pena is known as illusive, and she usually disappears from the music scene for years on end. Her voice is haunting, and the connection she makes with Violeta Parra is transnational and brings back memories of the connection formed in the early 1970s between the Revolution in Portugal and the terrible violence that followed soon after, with the support of the US administration to undermine and destroy the Allende regime. Fado is an ingredient in her work, and her first album was called phado, but she does not want to be narrowly classified. She was proposing a key of interpretation bringing other songs that could be approached as fado. Robin Denselow writes that her approach to music is ‘wandering borderless and intuitively through different languages and sounds’. She draws on an ever-shifting stream of texts.
