For the Portuguese singer Carminho, fado is more than a genre of music—it is a language through which she expresses her spiritual growth. Having listened to fado as far back as the womb, Carminho is deeply rooted in the tradition but is reshaping it to embody who she is.
The Latin Grammy nominee is also taking fado to new audiences. She recently released an EP she recorded with the late hardcore musician and engineer Steve Albini. She also had a pivotal role in the Yorgos Lanthimos film Poor Things, introducing fado to moviegoers worldwide.
The recently released EP on Nonesuch, Carminho at Electrical Audio, is the result of a single day in the recording studio and home of Albini, who gained notice playing guitar with hardcore bands such as Big Black, then became a renowned producer of landmark albums by Nirvana, Pixies and PJ Harvey, among others.
“That day was just one day, an effort of 14 hours of work in that beautiful place,” Carminho said. “You know when you go to a place and you feel like, wow, I want to stay here drinking my coffee and just listening to music. It was convivial and beautiful. So it was a moment, an unforgettable moment.”
They agreed to record live in the studio, Carminho said, which she had done on her last two albums. “I think it is how I can bring more intensity and emotionality to the performances and the interpretation.”
“When you go to the studio, and you record everybody at the same time,” she said, “sometimes there are mistakes, and you have to accept the mistakes, and you have to accept that fragility and vertigo that you create in the studio. It’s one of the albums recorded in the studio that probably seemed closer to the ambience of a fado house,” she said, “because you can hear a place, a room. You can also almost listen to the smiles, hesitations, and looks between musicians.”
While the partnership with Albini began auspiciously, several months later, he died of a heart attack. “So I was planning to come back, and unfortunately, it was not possible,” Carminho said. “It was so sad and was so unexpected. He was a guy with a lot of courage from my perspective, and he put into practice what he believed. He was devoted to the studio that he built. It was very touching. When he passed away, I felt we lost not only a man but also a way of working and thinking in the music industry that we miss and think is important to preserve.”
Carminho also introduced fado in the Oscar-winning Poor Things. When the protagonist, Bella Baxter, visits the ancient but futuristic city of Lisbon that Lanthimos created, she happens upon a singer on a balcony. Carminho, as the singer, brings her soul-stirring voice to “O Quarto (The Room)”, and the powerful song awakens the passions within Bella that propel her through the rest of the story. The track was arresting enough that Barack Obama included it in his Spotify summer playlist this year.
Carminho was pleasantly surprised to learn that the director was familiar with fado and her work. They agreed she would sing her tune, “O Quarto”, with the iconic fado accompaniment of a Portuguese guitar. Lanthimos didn’t want a man to play the instrument and asked Carminho if she could do it. She asked for a week to decide. Though she played the classical guitar, she had never played the Portuguese guitar, which has 12 strings and is tuned differently. She took some quick lessons from her bandmate and felt confident enough after several days she could pull it off.
Carminho was raised in the Algarve region, the daughter of a successful fado singer, Teresa Siquero, surrounded by the music who sang to her while pregnant. She began singing at an early age, although there were no fado houses in her hometown. “My grandmother always said, ‘Sing with a choir because you have a gift.’ I didn’t think it was cool to sing in the mass, but my grandmother insisted, and so I was singing with them because I had to give back what God gave to me.”
The family moved to Lisbon, and in her college years, Carminho began singing in fado houses for pocket money. She was offered several record contracts, but she turned them all down, even though she was unhappy with a short-lived career in marketing. “I was very unprepared,” she said, “I thought: I’m going to say no because I need to discover myself to make an album and a career. I need to be something. I need to discover something in me that I want to say to others. I was looking for my gift, my vocation in life.”
She decided to take a year off and travel around the world, doing volunteer work with Mother Teresa in India, caring for people at the end of their lives, and in Peru to help earthquake victims. “I think volunteer work can get you a lot of [insight into] yourself,” she said. “Because you work without receiving anything, but you feel in others what you are. I discovered where I want to put all my energy, all my soul, all my working days.
“In the end, I decided I need to sing,” she continued. “Because I think I have to give back. I have to put all my energy and work into something that I like. I said to my father at that time, ‘I don’t think it’s fair to earn money singing because this is so easy for me to sing.’ He said, ‘First, I think you have to be thankful you’re going to do something that you really like to earn money because there’s not many people in the world that earn money doing what they like and also don’t think that it’s going to be easy.’ I understood years after that he was right.”
“You need to work a lot to make this work,” she said. “This grows from yourself; you are the fountain. You have your own universe, and you have to decide to make the fountain start to flow. If you don’t work, the fountain doesn’t flow. So, it depends on yourself, your body, your soul, and your energy. In the end, it’s incredible. I feel very grateful for that. The volunteer work was very important to my perception of that. Now, I think my destiny is to make music.”
Carminho continues to see fado as a conduit for her self-expression and loves its spirit of improvisation. Over the years, she has added untraditional touches, such as a pedal steel guitar, and written her own lyrics to broaden the genre. While the genre was once considered old-fashioned and was associated with the force-fed nationalism of the country’s authoritarian regime, younger artists like Carminho have led a revival within Portugal.
“I go often to fado houses to inspire myself and to fill me with the language,” she said. “These kind of genres—like blues or tango—with the root, with so many years, you can make changes from inside out, and it’s incredible. You find some gaps and opportunities to insert some things. It’s given me a lot of pleasure and a lot of joy to do this work. I don’t know my future, maybe a rock band. I love rock. [The plasticity] is also something that keeps me in fado. If I had to make it all just only a memory exercise to sing the standards, I would probably have given up earlier because I need to sing myself. I need to sing my generation, my thoughts, my beliefs. Some of the themes in fado sometimes are very male chauvinist, and then I want to subvert that and try to bring other themes with new ideas—that women should be part of this more than ever.”
As she works on a new album to be released next year and contemplates her career, she says, “I just follow the path. I don’t try to control too much. I need to understand that the way is my way, and I don’t want to force it to go a different way just because it’s easier or just because it’s more pop or going to [sell more]. I go with my instinct, and sometimes I don’t know if it will be very popular, but I have to be loyal to myself. So when I go to the stage, I must be completely in love with what I’m singing. That’s why every performance is incredibly different and with a lot of intention. Sometimes, in fado, the moment pushes you to make different things, which is beautiful.”