Although in Cuba she is known, above all, for her interpretations of fados, Lindiana Murphy has had a much more extensive and diverse career path. With her music, free of labels, she has traveled to different countries where she takes the best of each one’s folklore to later experiment with other sounds.
“I adore folk music, the pure root of each country. Over the years I found my idols: from Silvio Rodríguez, Mercedes Sosa, Chavela Vargas or Rubén Blades who taught me that with the truth you can get anywhere ”, he confesses to OnCuba when talking about his influences.
Composer, interpreter, arranger and producer of her own records, Lindiana is aware that the success of an artist is not necessarily given by the rules imposed by the market.
“I enjoy connecting with only ten people and I have had the joy of singing for 45,000, but it does not compare with the connection at the National Museum of Fine Arts, for example, or in a “descarga” in Centro Habana. That kind of emotion is deep and true.”
“I do not criticize the different types of markets, but I assumed a long time ago not having the need for a large audience. The number does not define me, it does not interfere with me. The fundamental thing is that they find something in common with what I am saying in my concerts”, maintains the author of “Olas” and adds:
“Within Cuba we are not exactly market favorites. Here it is more difficult for me to get a job and it is much easier for me in countries like Italy, Colombia, Portugal… The proposals that come to me correspond to what I have sown in recent years, with the music that I want to make”.
Saramago’s poetry
Although it is the first time that Lindiana Murphy has made an entire album with poems set to music, in her presentations she always tries to put some poetry made into a song.
It was not surprising then that an album like poems à mouth dated created together with the pianist Rosa García.
“Taxidermy or poetically hypocritical”, from the album poems à mouth dated (3.24)
Taxidermy or poetically hypocritical
Can I talk about death while I live?
Can I howl with imagined hunger?
Can I fight in hidden verses?
Can I fake it all by being nothing?
Can I draw truths from lies,
Or flood a desert from fronts?
Can I change strings and lyres
And make the open sun bad at night?
If everything is reduced to vain words
And with them I cover my withdrawal,
From the top of the shadow I deny the light
As the song refuses embalmed.
Crystal eyes and imprisoned wings,
Spent the words I have stayed
What trace of true things.
Fulfilling a request made by the Portuguese embassy in 2018 to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize for Literature to José Saramago, it was not until 2023 that the material recorded at the Abdala Studios and under the label could come to light. Hummingbird record label.
Ten songs —poems— make up the album that has the special participation of the Portuguese singer Filipa Tavares. The musical production and arrangements were carried out by Emilio Martiní, Lindiana herself and Rosa García.
The renowned painter Moisés Finalé was in charge of the works that illustrate the album cover and its interior.
“Day no” of the album poems à mouth dated (3.12)
day not
Of lying landscapes
Of luar and dawn
Of perfumes and roses
Of simulated vertigo
let the poem undress
Of those borrowed clothes
be dry be rough
which calcined stones
that does not speak from the heart
nor delicate things
say no when no
that does not pretend masquerades
How ashamed to walk away
If cheeks feel wet
that for his cries he chooses
The most covered ears
And when you talk about me
with bitter words
that the poem is like that
Doors and streets closed
Ah what saudades of the yes
In these desolate rhymes
For the editor Yamilé Tabío “the Spanish adaptations meticulously carried out by Lindiana Murphy and Rosa García, are the reflection of the deepest truth of the spirit that concurs simultaneously in the same point and in the same motives.”
And adds:
“This album was born after a very long labor, after a pact with life. These Cuban women have been apprehending Saramago, led by the hand by the teacher Isabel Gaspar, they have been hatching the meaning of the verses, they have been weaving this beautiful skein with the birth of a child, between pandemics and destructions, between love and whistle of the sea (…) A record that takes us to that unmistakable feeling of Saramago who never gave up on his message of the need for social change”.
Lindiana Murphy knows that “art has to be done in the most sincere way” and surely with poems à mouth dated proves it.
