It’s the Journey Listening Post 358. Art and life merge in the luscious voice of Elif Sanchez, and her second album offers the privileged listener an international voyage, no passport required. Her music rests on a traditional foundation of family and schooling: Born...
Light of Many Colors Listening Post 348. Lúcia de Carvalho has a friend who coaches people in writing personal testimonies designed to increase self-esteem. At the end of a project in Angola the friend asked the women farmers she had worked with to pose for a photo...
Spanish Steps Listening Post 347. Walk from Tijuana to Tierra del Fuego singing in Spanish and everyone along the route will understand the lyrics, the 10,800 km (6,700 miles) between the two points constituting the longest more-or-less straight line in the world you...
From the Top Listening Post 345. Like a mountain wind or a force of nature, Yungchen Lhamo’s voice gracefully and powerfully opens Awakening, her sixth album, demonstrating that beauty exists to direct our attention. In a rare convergence of planetary decay and...
Into the Wood Listening Post 342. From their formation as Dúa de Pel in 2014, Eva Guillamón and Sonia Megías lived the rarefied life of itinerant artists, flying to Buenos Aires and Beijing, to New York and Tokyo, to London and back to Madrid, performing, lecturing...
Wave of the Present Listening Post 334. Like ripples on the water or wrinkles in time, the songs of Mónica Giraldo’s seventh album radiate gently. Water and time, in fact, are central features of the Colombian singer-songwriter’s 10-track collection Hubo un Tiempo...
Tilting at a New World Listening Post 323. When Alex Cuba imagined his eighth album his dream may have seemed unreachable: He wanted songs that reflect the struggle and emotion simultaneously separating and uniting all humanity but he didn’t want them forever...
Where Music Never Stops Listening Post 317. More than coffee or summer rain, Cuba is drenched in music. It emanates from bars and homes, along Havana’s Malécon, from the streets and squares of cities and towns, from the public buses that weave through the countryside....
Provincial Classic Listening Post 303. A freedom-fighting poet named Perucho Figueredo wrote La Bayamesa, Cuba’s national anthem, on horseback in 1867, after Spanish authorities surrendered to pro-independence forces in Bayamo. More than 150 years on, the city—located...
Sterling Voice from a Silver Land Listening Post 295. The heart exerts its own form of gravity: The farther it travels, the more it feels the tug of home. When 18-year-old Delfina Cheb arrived at Boston’s Berklee College of Music she recalls drinking in the global...
All Over the Map Listening Post 290. Travel far and discover yourself: The idea has inspired literary figures and works from Camus to Kerouac to Cloud Atlas. The twist Carla Pires offers on her fourth studio album is assimilating the distant horizon not only into...
Carpe Diem Listening Post 285. Every lyric has three dimensions: Surface meaning (often the only facet listeners discern); an artist's background inspiration and context; and new interpretations that come from projecting songs onto future landscapes. On its face Aire,...
Destined to Dare Listening Post 256. Louisa Lyne’s art is inserting Yiddish songs into unexpected contexts. On her third album she and her band put the traditional language of Ashkenazi Jews into creative dialogue with Spanish, English, Hebrew and her native Swedish;...
B.A. in Bluegrass Listening Post 255. Joe Troop doesn’t so much play fusion as embody it: Since his North Carolina childhood, every sound he ever heard seems to have become part of his music personality. At 14 he was inspired when he saw Doc Watson perform, but as...
Tipping Toward Joy Listening Post 251. Dickens was right in concept but exaggerated the singularity of his age: It is always, in every era and every land, the best and worst of times. Great art often emerges from hard lessons, but sometimes songs written before a...
Stars from the Underground Listening Post 246. Imaginary exercise: Build an album around three quotes that express enduring truths. 1) “All you need is love;” 2) “Immigrants strengthen the fabric of American life;” 3) "A woman is like a tea bag – you never know how...
Sewing a Song, Composing a Flag Listening Post 240. According to legend, during the Dominican Republic’s War of Independence a certain solider abandoned his post in the midst of battle, and after victory his comrades mockingly sang ”Tomás fled with the flag” in a...
United States of Music Listening Post 234. The U.S.-Mexican border looms large in American discourse these days, but when it comes to the mariachi landscape the frontier barely exists. From Guadalajara to Hollywood to the facing shores of the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo, one...
Preparing for Takeoff Listening Post 229. People on three continents paid to see Nella Rojas sing on stage even before the launch of her splendid debut album, but her first post-release show had a captive audience—passengers on an Iberia Airlines flight from Madrid...
Music to Nurture Nature Listening Post 222. Colombia ranks second in the Americas for forest cover and second worldwide in overall biodiversity, but the country is paying an unexpected environmental price for peace: The 2016 accord between government and guerrillas...
Dominican Rhapsody Listening Post 220. Juan Luis Guerra and his band 4.40 forever altered the Latin soundscape with bachata and merengue flavored by salsa, jazz and rock infusions and vivid lyrics bearing everything from magical realism and social commentary to sexual...
Sense of Direction Listening Post 217. In an introductory prose-poem, Xabier Díaz identifies Noró as the north wind—with previous incarnations as stone and as woman—who fell in love with an Irishman peering at the cliffs of Galway. As wind, Noró dominates humankind...
Mystery and Transparency Listening Post 202. Before you process a single word, there is poetry in the sound of Mónica Giraldo’s voice and guitar—a natural healing force akin to a magnificent sunset or refreshing breeze. As the lyrics flow the sensation deepens with...
Baby Love Listening Post 192. Accustomed to naming each of his albums after one of its standout tracks, Fonseca switched gears when he realized his newest release would coincide with his wife's giving birth. Thus did Agustín become his eighth baby and also his third....
Mood Synthesizer Listening Post 190. Camus argued that travel is a spiritual testing, stripping us of habitual surroundings and taking us not away from but toward our essence. Zaz, one of the most popular French artists abroad, did three world tours in four years and...
On the Road Listening Post 186. As one of France’s leading recording artists, Kendji Girac knows the rigors of a marathon tour—indeed, before voice or instrument, his earliest training was for the road. He was born in the Dordogne to a family of Catalan-speaking...
Little Big World Listening Post 180. Think global, act local. The mantra applies to government planning, the environment and business, but it’s also a defining feature of music—and few artists active today have embodied the concept longer than the French-Spanish...
Making Waves Listening Post 172. It’s easy to exaggerate a kindred connection between two people from the same city, even if they were born 150 years apart. But consider: Jules Verne, who grew up in Nantes, certainly knew that nature can send a wave thousands of miles...
Artist and Island, Uncovered Listening Post 171. The personal and the universal, the yin-yang of human connection. Artists strive for the formula—individual experience finding broad audience—and the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Kany García has scored with her...
Street Smart Listening Post 166. They began in struggle, illegal immigrants from Colombia and Argentina playing their music on the streets of Barcelona. Fifteen years later, Che Sudaka has performed more than 1,500 shows in 45 countries, etching a profile as...
