Fado singer Carminho reaping rewards for appearing in ‘Poor Things,’ planning new album

Fado singer Carminho enters 2024 planning a new international tour, thinking about a new album, and reaping the rewards of appearing in Yorgos Lanthimos’ film “Poor Things,” which has received multiple Oscar nominations.

Carminho has a brief appearance in the film, playing the Portuguese guitar in the fado song “O quarto,” in a scene with actress Emma Stone, set in an imaginary Lisbon, of an undefined time, but where there is no shortage of traditional ceramic tiles, old streets and lots of pastéis de nata.

Who’s the Portuguese fadista that appears in “Poor Things” starring Emma Stone?

Carminho told Lusa news agency that she took part in the shoot in 2021 in a studio in Budapest at a time when she was preparing the album “Portuguesa.”

Carminho says the director, who was well informed about fado, wanted the film to have a certain “connection between the traditional and the contemporary image” and also asked her to play the Portuguese guitar, which for the fado singer was a first and is still a rare experience for women.

“The film talks a lot about feminism and deconstructs more orthodox positions between men and women, and fado has been shaped for many years by very defined positions: the woman sings, the men run the fado house, play, and make the poems. He [the director] wants to deconstruct these more calcified constructions. I also feel that this is my role,” explained the singer.

For Carminho - who grew up in this environment, made her stage debut at the age of 12 and released her first album 15 years ago, precisely entitled “Fado” (2009) - fado is a language.

“Fado is my tradition, it was in fado that I learnt to read music, to interpret. Fado is the language, but the discourse doesn’t have to be that of a hundred years ago, or five years ago, it has to be a discourse that represents me, that speaks to me,” she emphasized.

The album “Portuguesa,” which opens with the fado “O quarto,” was released in March 2023, while the film “Poor Things” had an award-winning world premiere in September 2023 at the Venice Film Festival and is currently being shown in local movie theatres.

Carminho had an intense 2023, with almost 80 concerts in Portugal, other European stages, Brazil, Mozambique, and the United States. This past May, she was invited by Coldplay to sing the fado “Coimbra” with Chris Martin and Bárbara Bandeira at the Coimbra Stadium. In August, she sang for Pope Francis in Lisbon during a World Youth Day celebration.

In December, she also took part in the commercial premiere alongside the director and cast and gave a surprise performance of the fado she sings in the film.

“Poor Things” has won several awards and is nominated for 11 Oscars, including Best Original Score, which also includes the fado sung by Carminho.

All this is happening at a time when Carminho will continue the road to promote her album “Portuguesa,” but is already in pre-production of new songs, “recording, listening, experimenting.”

“For me, it’s always the most exciting moment of all, seeing things happen, but it’s also the one that makes me suffer the most,” she acknowledged.

For the singer, 2024 “looks set to be a rich year,” and her participation in “Poor Things” follows a commitment in recent years to reach more territories, whether in Europe, in the Portuguese-speaking world or in North America, “the big market that decides what is ‘mainstream’ in the world.”

This is the strategy, “exciting but hard” of “working the territory, going, insisting,” she said.

“Could it be more comfortable to stay [in Portugal]? It could have been, but the fruits are incredible, and perhaps I would never have been in this Yorgos film if I hadn’t reached him by some means, and that has to do with internationalization,” she said.

This article originally appeared on The Herald News: Fado singer Carminho reaping rewards for appearing in ‘Poor Things’