Lala Story

October 10, 2006 by Sanjay.

I recently signed up on a music exchange service called lala.com. It allows you to put up your “surplus” CDs on a “Have” list. You also create a “Want” list of CD you’d like. When a CD you want is available on another member’s Have list, that person ships it to you. Your credit card get charged $1.75. You end up with the CD, lala.com ends up with a buck, and the US postal service ends up with 75 cents. The person that shipped you the CD then receives a CD on her Want list from someone else that has it. Neat!

I am listening to the first CD I received through lala.com, by the Australian-British-Tamilian Susheela Raman. I happened to see her perform during a trip to Brighton in 2005. She has a terrifically deep voice, an attractive, if mannish, physicality on the stage, and a songbook that makes the word eclectic appear watery. On “Love Trap”, her sophomore effort, she sings compositions by, among others, Thyagaraja and Joan Armatrading plus a song from the sixties Hindi film “Yehudi”. All that accompanied by guitar, piano, drums, sax, tabla, dholak, and in case that isn’t exotic enough, Tuvan throat singing!

The worst I can say about her performance is that her Hindi diction is terribly South Indian (”chahe too aaye na aaye“). I suspect that like most Indi-pop, I’ll eventually tire of the compositional arbitrariness. But for now it’s marvellously exotic.

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