Fado Brazil

"That really happened without an intention. I was researching poetry and I was finding it poem by poem. I was not trying to get a line or trying to make a connection between the poems. It's strange. When I was in Brazil, at the end when the music was all recorded, I said to Jaques, 'Jaques, we are talking a lot about fado' and I didn't realise that. And he said 'I didn't pay attention because almost all the poems talk about fado' and I said 'But I never really realised that most of the time fado is in the lyrics; it's in the poems'."

"If you listen to other fado records they don't pass all the time talking about fado. Normally they talk about other types of things. They speak about fado, but sometimes they are not speaking about the music, but 'destiny'. And I think that sometimes in the records that appears, not only fado in the way of music but fado in the way of living. For example we have a poem by Fernando Tordo and he's talking about fado in the same way he's talking about the music, but in the second meaning, if you read it a second time, you discover he's talking about the destiny."

I pressed her about why she had earlier instinctively mentioned rebetika, tango, etc.; often called the Greek blues, the Argentinian blues. People talk about fado as the Portuguese blues. Does she find there really is a strong link? "Yes, I feel it, because all those types of music, they speak about the same things as we speak about. I was in Egypt giving a concert and it was amazing because they invited me to see one of the best-known Egyptian female singers from the young generation, and I went to the concert and when she was singing I was having goose bumps. And I was thinking that there goes fado. If she was singing in Portuguese I was understanding everything with fado. And I think fado has a lot of connections with cultural musics, with urban musics, because it's a music that talks about feelings like tango, like morna, like rebetika, like that Egyptian music I heard. I sing in Portuguese, she was singing in Arabic, in tango they sing in Spanish, but if you mixed everything at the end you're going to understand they're talking about feelings that are universal. So you don't have the frontier of the language, and you can feel it."