Traditional Portuguese fado music has a particular sound that makes it instantly recognizable. Still, the singer Carminho shows that fado is as much a feeling as a specific set of instruments and vocal techniques. In her latest album, Eu Vou Morrer de Amor ou Resistir (I am Going to Die from Love or Resist), the 41-year-old singer weaves textures and sounds into her songs that could make someone familiar with the genre ask at times: “Is this fado?” Carminho, who began hearing fado in the womb, said that fado is more than the traditional acoustic trio of Portuguese guitar, acoustic guitar, and bass.
“Fado for me is an instrument that I use to understand my doubts, and to communicate, to express myself. Fado is actually the language that I’m speaking,” she said. “It’s more or less like a pencil. If I’m drawing, if I’m writing, it’s about the creativity, but I’m always using the same pencil.”
She begins her new album with “Balada do Pais que Doi (Ballad of the Country That Hurts)”, which, in the simplicity of its lyrics, channels fado’s origins of telling stories about sailors venturing out to the dangerous Atlantic Ocean as their loved ones hope for their safe return. “Boats go out / Boats come back / Portuguese go out / Portuguese come back.” However, the song’s archetypal theme is rendered through unexpected, subtle electronic washes.
“Fado is a language that is alive and is to be spoken,” Carminho said, “not to be just memorized or repeated. It also has a very important legacy, and the classics and the standards are there for you … but it’s for you to live outside in the world.”
The new record, she said, continues her expansion of the genre’s sound, though she is quick to point out that she is not trying to create new sounds solely for the sake of being creative.
“The motivation is not to do the newest thing, or ‘What can I bring that nobody’s heard before,'” she said. “The instruments I have in the album are more or less organically in the album. Imagine if a musician who plays with you already is exploring new instruments, and you’re listening to them, and you feel: ‘OK, this could be very beautiful in this way, with this approach. Let’s try this. Let’s try that.'”
In Eu Vou Morrer de Amor ou Resistir, Carminho and her bandmates added instruments that would be unusual in any context. One is the Cristal Baschet, a rare instrument made of a series of thin glass tubes that the player rubs, like one would get sound from the rim of a wine glass. Another is the ondes Martenot, an early electronic instrument invented in 1928, which has a spacey, wavering sound similar to the theremin.
While fado is traditionally acoustic, Carminho’s music often includes electric and pedal steel guitars, used to add texture and color rather than for linear solos. On this record, she added a Mellotron programmed so that each key triggered a reproduction of her deep, smoky voice. The result, she said, was a distinctive type of harmony.
“I’m singing, and also there’s another me singing with me,” she said, “It’s not exactly me, but the timbres are the same. It’s something that reminds me of the times when I was singing with my brothers and sisters in the car. The voice combines so perfectly when brothers and sisters sing together.”
Carminho remakes older songs and poems but also writes originals. Here, she writes several impressionistic stories, including “A Sombra do Teo Cabelo (The Shadow of your Hair)”, inspired by time with her baby son.
She said she saw a shadow amid her son’s dark hair and “I imagined that little shadow was a portal to the world of innocence and the world of freedom. There was an incredible world of things to explore. Normally, when we grow up, we lose the opportunity to go through that little door, and when a child is born, it’s reopened again.” “We can see upside-down houses / And the scenery will soon change / It will be different from this side.“
Eu Vou Morrer de Amor ou Resistir also marks a personal high point for Carminho, as she collaborated with a longtime heroine, the avant-garde composer and singer Laurie Anderson. Carminho wrote “Saber (To Know)” and considered Anderson an inspiration for it, so took a chance and reached out to her. In the song, their differing vocal approaches and languages intertwine for a haunting sound.
Carminho is the daughter of a successful fado singer, Teresa Siqueira, so she grew up surrounded by the music. Born in Lisbon but raised in the Algarve, which didn’t have a large fado scene, her family moved back to Lisbon and opened a fado house. For years, she sang fado as a passion project and for some pocket money, but she thought she didn’t have the life experience to be a true fadista.
After working in marketing for a year, she took time to volunteer, spending time at Mother Teresa’s hospice in India and in Peru helping earthquake victims. Those experiences led her to the idea of serving others, and she often thought back to her grandmother, who urged her to use her God-given talent.
In recent years, Carminho has introduced fado to new audiences. She had a brief but pivotal appearance in the movie Poor Things, bringing her powerful, gut-grabbing voice to “O Quarto (The Room)”, which was a turning point in the emotional development of Bella, the character played by Emma Stone. The song even made its way onto Barack Obama’s 2024 summer playlist. The year prior, she sang in Lisbon for Pope Francis during a Youth Day prayer vigil attended by more than a million people, and she shared the stage for a fado song with Coldplay during one of their shows in Portugal.
Because she considers fado a “living language”, Carminho records in the studio to capture the spark of playing in front of an audience, allowing the musicians to improvise and try new approaches. Having recorded her last release with the late hardcore guitarist and producer Steve Albini, she said fado is in some ways analogous to punk because of its spontaneity and spilling over of raw emotions.
“The process, for me, is so fun and so creative, and the musicians are so great, because they are so talented, and they bring so many things. At the same time, they are so open to my directions because the directions are sometimes very personal. When you communicate organically with great and talented musicians, it’s heaven; we are just having the most beautiful times together.”
One of her roles in the studio, she said, is to fold in new ideas intuitively so they serve the song and remain true to the soul of fado. To do that, she sets “the boundaries of the language” of fado.
“It’s not because there’s a Portuguese guitar there that the fado exists there,” she said. “There’s a lot of research for me. There’s a lot of study in not just fado theories but also in myself, in my memories. I cannot forget what I lived with my parents, with my schooling in fado houses. When I have a question, when I have a doubt about what to do in this way, in this moment, I always come back to them, because I’m sure they’re going to have the answer.”
