Back from the big top

Lhasa de Sela, a Mexican-American singer-songwriter who goes by Lhasa, had no reason to expect that her debut album, ''La Llorona," would become one of 1998's international sleeper hits. At the time, she was singing in Montreal bars to modest crowds, ''poor but getting by on pasta," she says, and reading Spanish-American poetry from the early 1900s passed along to her by her father.

Like the mythical Aztec figure it's based on, ''La Llorona" was rife with mystery and whimsy. The liner notes contained no information about the artist, and fans wrote online reviews inquiring about this curious woman's identity. They might have caught Lhasa, who plays at Johnny D's tonight, at Lilith Fair, but for the most part, she remained a sensation mainly in Quebec and Europe (''La Llorona" sold more than 300,000 copies in France alone).

''I was so naïve about my first album," she says on the phone from Montreal. ''I had no idea what it meant to have a record out. I went from having maybe 100 people at my shows in bars to selling 10,000 copies in Quebec, and I just couldn't believe it. We were paid for five weeks to make the album, and it took us six months. We really got into it, and our dreams got bigger and bigger."

Eventually, her success consumed her. ''After a while with touring you feel disconnected, like you're an island unto yourself. After 'La Llorona,' the idea of living in a trailer with my sisters and going off the map seemed like the most wonderful thing to me."

That's exactly what she did. In 1999, she joined a circus in France for a year with her sisters, singing songs while they acted. ''I like the circus a lot," she says. ''It's one of the last survivors of a culture that stayed seedy and underground. The media doesn't really deal with it, so it's still otherworldly and mysterious."

Lhasa knows plenty about otherworldly and mysterious. Those are the best descriptions for her music. She's made two albums that are practically the archetypes for such characteristics.

''She really does art and doesn't seem to worry about making commercial music," says singer Lila Downs, who shares Lhasa's affinity for traditional Mexican music. ''She has her own take on the traditional ranchera style and a beautiful vocal color. The melodic lines are very much like traditional rancheras, but the harmony and arrangements take you somewhere else."

Lhasa is one of the rare singers admired for her consistency, in her vocals, arrangements, and lyrics. Rich, husky, and at once confident and vulnerable, her voice is an organic instrument that coils around notes, then languidly wrings them dry.

She started singing Billie Holiday covers at 13 and recalls that she sounded much older than that. Bob Dylan (particularly ''Blood on the Tracks") was also a huge influence on her.

After her year in the circus, Lhasa spent ''three years trying to figure things out," finally landing in Marseille, the French city that informs much of her sophomore album, last year's ''The Living Road." The album departed from her debut in its sonic structure and themes, and yet Lhasa's predilection for vivid narratives and supple instrumentation remained intact. A sense of forlorn travels permeates the album, and it's a bold and worthwhile gesture from an artist so celebrated for her first album. But try explaining that to fans who fell so madly in love with ''La Llorona."

Lhasa recognizes the frustration some fans had with ''The Living Road."

''I knew this would happen when I was making it," she says. ''I think 'La Llorona' was easier to categorize. It was very Latin melancholy, in a way. But 'The Living Road' is very personal and intimate."

There are playful elements of circus music on ''The Living Road," with sprightly piano melodies accompanying her on songs in Spanish, French, and English, whereas ''La Llorona" was entirely in Spanish. Her songwriting, too, has become more original, based less on other people's poetry and more on her own experiences.

From her earliest years, Lhasa has known that she has led an idyllic life, one full of her family's vagabond travels shaped by exotic landscapes, foreign languages, and her father's interest in Eastern philosophy. Her father is a professor of Spanish in upstate New York, while her mother is a former actress turned photographer and musician.

Lhasa has lived in Montreal since 1992, but she was born in Big Indian, a village near Woodstock, N.Y., perched at the foothills of the Catskill Mountains. The family didn't stick around long, though. ''We traveled around a lot when I was growing up because my parents were on a quest, kind of a spiritual quest. I was always very aware of the romantic aspect of my childhood."

Over the next seven years, the family zigzagged across North America in a converted school bus, making stops in Guadalajara and Baja California, meeting priests and yogis and befriending the indigenous locals. Entertainment was restricted to books and the family's nightly music sessions. Her parents insisted on no television, a practice Lhasa continues to this day. The nomadic travel halted when a car accident involving her mother led the family to move to San Francisco, where Lhasa began to pursue her music in earnest.

Now, as more fans discover her work in the United States, Lhasa says she's finally looking forward to the future.

''The reason it took me so long to do another album is because it took me a couple of years to believe in myself," she says. ''I didn't have the confidence. I was so anxious and freaked out about making another album. I know people need to categorize my music, and that's not that important to me. I have to say that I don't feel like a world-music or jazz singer, though. I feel like a rock singer; it's just the rock music of my inner thoughts."