Lamya

MY OFFICAL MYSPACE PAGE......It is with deepest regret to haveto inform you all that Lamya has passed away on the 8th of January 2009 inher home town Oman. She died of a heart attack. This has come as a great shock to all of her family anddear friends as I am sure it is to YOU her fans. We will dearly miss her andmay God rest her soul.Kamil Al-Hinai www.myspace.com/kamilalhinai................................ ........................................ We thought of you with love today,But that is nothing new.We thought about you yesterday.And days before that too.We think of you in silence.We often speak your name.Now all we have is memories.And your picture in a frame.Your memory is our keepsake.With which we'll never part.God has you in his keeping.We have you in our heart© Rose De Leon........................................................ ............................................................ ............................................................ ............................................................ ............................................................ ............................................................ ............................................................ ............................................................ ............................................................ ................Lamya was born in Kenya of Omani descent, and raised in Sheffield, England, Lamya (pronounced Lamb-ya) wrote, arranged, performed, and produced all of her own material. She was classically trained as a opera singer whose gorgeous vocals were best known from her work on Soul II Soul's Vol. II: A New Decade and Vol. V: Believe; she has appeared on records by some of the biggest acts of the last quarter century, among them David Bowie and James Brown as well as recent work by Duran Duran, Anjelique Kidjo and Cheb Mami. Her first solo album (Learning from Falling) stood out in the pop music landscape, Lamya's otherworldly vocals were supported by laid-back hip-hop and dance beats, luscious string arrangements, guitars, sitars, and a panoply of Eastern percussion. Flexing a swooping five-octave range, Lamya whispered, soared and swirled her soulful instrument around her strikingly literary tales of love, defiance, and the uphill search for identity. The songs on her debut album Learning from Falling were culled from poems she wrote all her life, some as early as age 11. Lamya's sound- scapes were unique three dimensional worlds that invited comparisons to Bjork and Kate Bush. But Lamya was always her own, managing to balance eccentricity with an inviting melodic accessibility. Sent to school in England then Egypt, Lamya ran away to NY after seeing a video interview of Madonna. Retracing the material girl's steps, she arrived in Manhattan to find her own Jellybean Benitez and Danceteria. There was one problem - all of those haunts were gone. "She went to NY and tried to find Studio 54," she recalled, "People said to her, 'Girl, it's gone, where you been?' And she'd say, 'Oman.' 'What? Omaha?' 'No, OMAN!', "After that she thought 'What had she done coming to NY? She just started going around to all of the clubs running up to the dj booths and saying, 'Hello! I sing!' Little did She know that the whole of NY could sing!She caught a break as featured vocalist with Soul II Soul. She toured the world and became at home on the road, a process solidified by two years on tour with Duran Duran. All the while Lamya had crafted her own music, much of which went through rock permutations very different from their present incarnations. Lamya is exquisite on record and simply was breathtaking live. She was a songstress whose instrument needed no processing, whose skills were more powerful the more they were stripped down. She was a woman of paradox, a trained opera singer who preferred to sing pop, a woman more comfortable on stage before 20,000 strangers than in a room with 2, an intensely private person whose lyrics told her most personal life stories.The songs on Learning from Falling are as exotic as they are full of pop hooks, as dark as they are sunny, as healing as they are hurting. What else could have been expected from a multi-lingual trombone-playing singer? "From living in so many places, she has found that you can convey what you mean without even knowing the language,She said. "If you really understand what you are trying to say, you can communicate on several levels at once. Some things are universal. If I sing the last verse of a song in Swahili, I think people can still understand what I'm saying because they hear the feeling in it.".