Artist’s Brain: The Energy Of Lusa Morena Goes Beyond The Stage, Literally
Reviving an interview I did with an exquisite local band in London as I begin interviewing more local bands/artists for this newsletter.
Welcome friends. So some of you may know that I started my career in journalism just about ten years ago by interviewing opening acts so I could get on the list for bands I really wanted to see.
At that time I didn’t think a career in journalism was possible, but now I know that it is, and I’ve never lost interest in speaking with rising acts. There is something special about interviewing an artist who hasn’t been interviewed before (or at least very few times).
The excitement within the conversation. Unfolding a story so few people have heard before. It’s an experience I relish every time, and I am thrilled to share those experiences through the continuing series: Artist’s Brain.
Artist’s Brain entries will come about intermittently throughout the newsletter, and this will be the only one that includes an intro like this.
Unlike every other entry in this newsletter, which is shamelessly all about me, Artist’s Brains are about the artists, and moving forward, the copy will dive right into their stories.
For now, enjoy the story of Lusa Morena. A truly spectacular band.
Lusa Morena gigs should all come with a notice for those standing front row. Not so much a warning because there is nothing to be afraid of. More a sign to build anticipation:
“Watch out for Bárbara.”
Simply put, those who have the chance to see the five-piece, London-based alternative rock band need to be aware that standing in front means a strong possibility of coming face to face with the group’s lead singer, songwriter, and creative director, Bárbara Almeida.
Because at some point during the show, Bárbara is going to leave the stage. It’s a guarantee.
“It just happened on the first gig that we did and I knew I might keep doing it,” Bárbara says to me sitting in a pub in East London. “There’s nothing worse than performing, especially real high energy stuff and people are [very stationary]. You’re going to love me whether you want it or not.”
There is no set choreography for Bárbara when she’s on the floor. Sometimes she slinks down to the ground, leaning so far back on her knees that her ankles are by her ears. Other times she finds one lucky attendee and gets right in their face whether they know all the lyrics to the song or not.
Lucky is the apt descriptor in that case because after she finds her way back to the stage and continues the fiery, exuberant dance motions that match the raging cohesion of her bandmates, everyone in the crowd is left with a sense of longing that Bárbara didn’t get in their faces, too.
“She is very charismatic, she has a presence,” says Zé Pedro Viveiros, Lusa Morena’s rhythm guitarist, of Bárbara “She has a very big gravitational pull around her.”
That pull has attracted a solid community of fans and fellow musicians around Lusa Morena, and it also brought together the band itself, a group of musicians united by more than their talent.
Bárbara, Zé (whom they call Zed), the bassist Bernardo Rodeiro (Bernie), and the drummer Lourenço Galante Tato Brito are all native to Portugal (some of them are from the same cities), who never once met each other in Portugal.
(The fifth member and lead guitarist, Lisa Marie, isn’t Portuguese, but shreds the riffs like a maniac so they had to let her in the band).
The seeds of Lusa Morena were planted before the pandemic, and it all started with Bárbara’s stage presence.
She had another band called the Money Honeys around that time, and Zed saw her perform, but she wasn’t performing her own music. A year later, the two of them were in the same class together at uni, and she wanted to start bringing her own music to life and so they started collaborating around October 2019.
Before lockdown, Bárbara had also encountered Bernie at a uni party, and discovered he was not only Portuguese, but he was from her hometown of Coimbra. So when they were both in Coimbra briefly in the summer of 2020, they connected and Bernie joined the band.
Bernie was the one who knew Lourenço, who is from Porto, from their shared university in London, and brought him in to play drums.
But despite the solid crew that Bárbara brought together, she still needed a second guitarist to round out her songs. Her first instinct was to ask another Portuguese friend of hers who played guitar, but he was moving back to Portugal, so he provided her with four names of other guitarists, two of whom were women, one of whom had zero online evidence that she was a guitarist, and that was Lisa.
“For some reason, I fuck with this. For some reason, I love that this girl has zero videos. To me, because I’ve always been so quiet about my abilities towards music, I find it interesting when people are quiet about their abilities towards music as well,” Bárbara says.
The lack of social media presence made it a smidge difficult for Bárbara to track down Lisa, but she did eventually and Bárbara describes it as “an instant click” among the five of them.
It’s a dynamic you can feel when the band is on stage together, but also when they’re hanging out together. As we sit on the upper patio of The Crown, a pub across from Victoria Park, only absent Bernie, the conversation shifts from discussing their process and journey as a band to debating the state of music around the world today.
How Phoebe Bridgers combines different production elements. How HAIM is evolving rock and roll. How DOMi & JD BECK define Gen-Z’s hunger for older styles presented in a new way.
Also a conversation about how different music scenes are distributed across Portugal, from the jazzy history of Lisbon to the more alternative community of Porto. One goal they’ve collectively set as a band is to perform in Portugal. They already love playing together, and so playing in (almost all of) their home country would only add to their passion.
“The thing that connects us all is the pure joy of playing,” says Bárbara.
Whatever they play starts with Bárbara’s lyrics, though. That’s the core of every song. Before she brings anything to the other members, she writes the lyrics, and ironically, despite her joy of being on stage with her friends, she almost never writes when she’s happy.
“I write the lyrics when I’m either very frustrated or angry or depressed. One of the above,” Bárbara says with a laugh. “[Lyrics] are the thing that I’ve always really loved in music. I find melodies great, but if the lyrics are shallow, it’s a flop. The song just sinks. It’s not the music that will give me the message. It’s the message that will give me the music. To me, it has to start with a story.”
Just as Bárbara is fully honest in her stage presence, she is fully honest about how she finds those stories, and many overlap with her own story of becoming an artist.
She is open about the lack of support from her family regarding the prospect of pursuing music as a career when she was growing up in Portugal. Her dad wanted her to be a politician and her grandmother wanted her to be a doctor (but since she moved to London there are fully supportive of her career in music).
Now that she is a professional artist, she faces internal doubts about her own abilities as an artist. Imposter syndrome. The fear that she wasted her time when she was young by not pursuing music full throttle.
“I do write a lot about how I struggle with my own mental health because the thing that’s been most overwhelming recently has really been my mental health and how I struggled during lockdown,” Bárbara says. “During lockdown that’s when I really started fully writing. No more fucking around.”
After she stopped fucking around, the band was mostly in place and ready to bring her vision, her emotions, and her stories into reality.
As with any project where multiple members are involved, there has to be a process behind the creation so decisions can be made toward a final product. Bárbara takes on the responsibility of guiding the rest of the band through that process.
She is an instrumentalist as well, studying piano when she was young (even though it didn’t inspire her) and now working on improving her skills on guitar, so she can present an overall idea of what the song will sound like to the band from both a lyrical and instrumental perspective.
She’ll have a verse, a chorus, one thing that she believes is really good. From there, each member brings in their own individual expertise on their instrument to solidify the song in its final form, and Bárbara is aware of their strengths and how each best serves the evolution of the music.
For example, she’ll often start by bringing her original idea to Zed or Bernie to build out the chords, melodies, and harmonies. But many Lusa Morena songs include heavy, rhythmic guitar riffs, and Lisa writes those as lead guitarist after the song exists in a more tangible form.
“[Lisa] likes to think she’s not a songwriter which I don’t agree with, but she thrives when all the harmony is there and she can just do the melodies,” Bárbara says.
It’s more than just recognizing where each member thrives as a musician, though. It’s about giving them space to express their identity and take ownership of the song just the same.
“There’s that element of myself that I’m putting into the music, and that’s part of this bigger picture,” says Lisa. “I shine better improvisationally so most of the time if something is already done then I know I can have my voice sitting there over the top saying my little things.”
That’s one of her many contributions, but she is not the only one who gets to have fun with what they bring to the equation. This band is not about Bárbara shining when she’s singing or Lisa shining during her riffs and solos. None of the four instrumentalists are playing anything boring during a set.
“In the end, I have loads of fun doing my own drumming. I really love having this sense of freedom,” says Lourenço. “Like Bárbara says, never overplay in the end. Play the song. That’s the most important thing. Listen and play what makes sense in the song.”
Bárbara wants them to have that freedom, but within her own vision, and just like any team leader there are times when she steps in to take charge. Sometimes the other members will bring in song ideas and she vetoes them because they don’t fit with her vision of the project.
Other times she’ll dictate elements as granular as the direction of strumming as she did on a tune called “Jess’s Song.” She wanted Zed to start the song with upstrokes, but Zed was reluctant because, in his more-than-a-decade of playing guitar, he said downstrokes were the proper way to play.
But Bárbara didn’t give a fuck.
“I’m not a guitarist so I don’t give a fuck. I like the way that [the upstrokes] sound,” Bárbara says. “When he started learning [the song] he was playing it the way that he would play correctly, and I said no because it’s not the vibe of the song. So I’m quite specific in those things.”
As specific and direct as she can be, though, they see each other as “a family” as Lourenço says (before Zed calls him “a cheesy motherfucker”). The music couldn’t exist without the bond they share as humans. The band lives as a support system for one another.
Bárbara may be assured of the details of the music, but she’ll come to other members of the band when she’s going through a hard time personally. At one point she believed she was done writing songs, and it was Zed who told her all she needed to do was take a break. Once she did, many of their current songs came to her.
Lusa Morena is not in a rush to blow up. They’ve just released the video for their second single, “Where’s The Spark (If Not In You),” following their debut “Six Sessions” which came out April 2022.
In the time between, they are enjoying their company, exploring their own identity as musicians, and of course, playing hella gigs around London and beyond. Anyone who may want more from them only needs to come see them live, but watch out for Bárbara. She might introduce herself to you microphone in hand.