Perhaps her parents had some inkling of her musical destiny when they christened her Lorelei, the Teutonic siren who lured men to their deaths with her songs. Or perhaps they were amused by the thought of how all those l's would sound rolling off the tongues of radio DJs.
But whatever the case, Lorelei Loveridge has the distinction of possessing a name and a voice that manages to insinuate and wrap itself about a room like the trails of bakhoor that are a staple of the many Saudi weddings she has witnessed during her decade-long spell in one of the world's most closed and inaccessible societies.
After the release of her critically acclaimed first album, Endless Contradictions, in 1995, Lorelei found herself strangely adrift, her budding music career fulfilling neither her expectations of success nor happiness.
With characteristic determination, she shook off her creative malaise and set off a year later on her own version of the Australian walkabout, venturing into the exotic realms of the greater world and her inner self, ultimately discovering what many world travelers have long known: Our lives come into sharper focus in direct proportion to our distance from our origins. That is, the farther we travel, the closer we are to home.
So for the last decade, Lorelei has been striving as might a marathon runner "to go the distance" with her music. Since her departure from Canada's Frozen North, she has opened at Dublin's Da Club for folk rocker Andy White. She's sampled sounds in ancient Nabatean tombs, dabbled with Gamelan bamboo xylophones in the rice paddies of Bali and performed in concert in the Arabian Desert.
In the process, she's racked up passport stamps from nearly two dozen different countries, absorbing and taking pleasure in "the images and textures of life around me." She explains: "The chaos of people in places eating, talking, selling, dancing, driving, working, all inspire some process in me that eventually manages to hook an idea or combine several and distill into a song. There's a magic in chaos and overstimulation."
While in Benares (Varanasi), India, she lived for a month in 1998 on a street notorious for pumping raw sewage into the Ganges. The street's name: Orderly Bazaar, an appellation that surely evokes the endless contradictions that have dogged Lorelei throughout her life. So, of course, it made perfect sense to adopt this handle for her record label and her particular brand of "roots rock ethnic jazz fusion."
In this second CD, Lorelei employs her impressive lyrical skills embroidering a patchwork of impressionistic word paintings, what she calls "landscapes of imagination and experience," of a world far removed from her native Canada, far flung from poodle-clipped lawns, reality TV and linoleum kitchens with their neat rows of tidy spice racks.
Abandoning house, car and even cats, she finds all she really needs——horseshoes, petty cash and a ride to the next town—in "I Need to Go," a song that harkens back to her Canadian country roots and the music of Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings. She croons, "I need a whiskey drunken poet's bed/On which to lay my body down," yearning for "a million miles between me/And everything that I know."
That million miles places her in Malaysia on Boxing Day in 2005 when the tsunami struck and in Lebanon in the summer of 2006 when Israeli warplanes began bombing the Beirut airport, and her lyrics bear witness to these events and many others of the troubled turn of the 20th century.
She laments about politicians who "lie to the world and deny they killed a schoolgirl" and religious zealots who "breed the next generation's will to fight." However, her lyrics convey the complexity and nuances of these events, the varying shades of grey of a life experienced through travel and a life lived in the face of adversity. She doesn't take sides but rather makes clear that there is a beauty in the complexity and that there is hope that people can find the tolerant middle ground, though it may always seem a stone's throw away.
Her songs are as haunting as sala'a, the daily prayer call offered five times a day towards Mecca. But what emerges from her music is a contemporary Oriental world, beyond the clichés of camels, caravans, palm trees and belly dancers Lorelei's Arabia is a land where young men in long white thobes sporting the traditional red-checkered ghutras and veiled women in their fluttering black abayas exchange phone numbers via Bluetooth and clamor to invest in the Saudi stock exchange. Where an 11-year old boy reacts to witnessing his first public execution, Where desert motorists turn two-lane backroads into four-lane speedways. Where a beggar refuses the hand-out offered to him. Where a mother worries, as her daughter must decide her future with a husband in jail in Jerusalem, and Lorelei asking what many of us long to, "What good will martyrdom do?"
In the end, her music can't help but reach out to us, envelope us with its smoke and musk, touch us with its passion and conviction. Her music is aromatic. As we walk away from it, it leaves its frankincense, patchouli and sandalwood, and its fleeting impressions of life on the move, lingering in the linings of our pockets and on the lapels of our jackets. Bakhoor.
