I started singing at the age of 9, without neighborhood or family traditions, I was born in Coimbra in the north-center of Portugal on a December night, moved to the outskirts of a Lisbon while still a child.
I started singing without aspirations or dreams.
Naturally.
The first time was on the stage of Lisbon Coliseum in 1989 and as a memory I keep a black and white picture of wide open eyes on a mix of fear and surprise.
Since then Fado has filled my life.
First the nights of vagabond fado (the Portuguese expression for the places where people can sing, even if they do not possess a good voice), between wine glasses and stories of lovers , jealousy and fights. Waking up late and tired for the school morning.
Then the amateur nights, already an obligation, but always a passion.
The first friendships, with much older people, who would tell stories of an unknown past, but that would stick to my skin with the label of “fadista” (fado singer).
The waking up late and tired for the school morning, wasn´t as strange physically.
Strange was the sensation of becoming only a girl again.
Back in those days, fado had not the same status as today.
To sing fado was to the children, colleagues, motif of mockery, motif of indifference.
The fado nights, would bring me the longed tenderness, the natural attention.
For its deepness, sadness and vastness of feelings, fado is not an infants song, however it was always the most melancholic fados that would captivate the lonely child.
Fado was the balm to the absence, the pillar to achieve strength, the way to life.
But from the fado sung in improvised stages on the back of a barrow, of the nights sleeping on the benches under the candle light, of the traditional fados, the natural step would be the ambition for other flights.
However, the child had become an adolescent, the grace was lost, it was time to prove much more.
Absorbed for many years the secrets of the popular and ancient fado, the search for something less conventional was starting to grow on me. The choices would already go to non traditional fados, to poems inspired in another form.
The search for a new path was taking form.
Still,  the career that has started so early, but had never been programed, happening naturally, was almost stagnant.
Fado, for the publishing editors in the end of the 90s, didn´t sell. Was not a good investment.
For that it comes the experience in pop, as a search for an alternative, inside a job that in Portugal is only considered an hobby.
Despite brief, the experience that made me winner of the RTP Song Contest, leaved me with an extraordinary memory and a deep friendship with the poet Luana Norte.

But fado had long stopped to be a choice.
That fado that had opened me the world doors and that had teached me to love it, had stopped being a music, had started being life.
The own definition of the word fado, which means destiny, had taken a definite sense.
It doesn´t matter how many adventures, how many discoveries of other meanings, of other musics, fado is still today the sweet prison for which I always returns, voluntarily, sometimes in anguish, sometimes with faith, but always irremediably as passionate as wondering at the age of eleven amongst shades of smoke at three o’clock in the morning.
Today with a different vision. More adult, obviously, more critic, but always for love.

What would change my path, though, was the musical “Amália”
The chance of holding my feelings, my chant and transform them on somebody else´s, was my first work as an actress.
Without any kind of preparation for the much life was about to change, I recreated the role of Amália with the greatest dedication, studied it, gave it a life of it´s own, made it my own, and in the extreme late ingenuity of my 20 years, let myself embark on an unexpected trip, both artistic and personally speaking.
The knowledge of the backstage, during five years, teached me a valuable lesson of life.
Amongst great friendships and great deceptions, I grew has a human being.
To the fame glimpse itself, if in the beginning, as any novelty, (I´m curious), dazzled me, I can say today that I became immune to it.

The following two years were of restart.
Relearn to become Liana again, relearn the concept of solo concert.
As a result of the experience on great stages, that the theatre as given me, and on a search to be the most truthful as possible, I hope I can say it worked.
Making mistakes, as all who searches, but basing myself on the immortal passion that I carry with me and the being faithful to what I believe, as the essence to accomplish dreams.

Joining Stockholm Lisboa Project was motivational all the way. I had never learnt how to be a part of a group. It was only with SLP that I found out what it is to be on tour, living together 24 hours a day with people that you did not choose as friends on the first place, that you only met and got together for music purposes, but that because of those strong bounds, because of the same passion, the same dream, do become friends in the way.
Road friends. Knowing when to give each other space and when to be there to support.

With SLP I got very good international reviews, good festivals, nice stages, but more then that the permission of being myself, able and gently compulsed to improvise, to fail and success without negative consequences. To learn.

On this business of so sensitive feelings, it is of extreme importance to feel professionally admired by the people you work with, and I was that lucky with SLP.

My passage through London was, now that I’m back and I can judge from a distance, as valuable as it was inglorious.
I recognise, only now, that through my path I was as adventurous as frightened. Much more ready to adventure myself on the most difficult things then to invest on the ones that could be more certain.   

That was what happened in England. I found myself managing a restaurant, influenced by the portuguese ideals of safe jobs, just because it was there. I fought and worked hard, real hard, to change narrow-minded people, to establish a new way of working. There, when I though I was running away of unconsciousness in Portugal, I’ve suffered  even more deeply what it is to be a patriot. 
I’ve tried to produce awareness of our country to foreigners through the exposure of Portuguese culture in an unexpected way, they would eat listening to fado, but not only, they would read Camões for the first time, they would experience hand tiles painting, they would learn what the Carnation revolution was, they would dance to a Madeira music. And I’ve managed it.

I contibuted to dignify the Portuguese culture in London, but it was hard to keep fighting proudly uneducated people, who, just as in the motherland, refuses to evolute. Refuses, with all their sharp weapons, evolution itself. Even if it comes wrapped in tradition as it was.

Fate showed me the way once more, my grandmother needed me in Portugal and so i’ve left London, never as a quitter, but as someone who had a bigger mission with family and someone with much bigger battles to fight.

I am back in Portugal, back in the beloved homeland. Lost in the roots of fado, lost in the contemporary history of the country, anxious to study it all, to embrace it all. 
I suppose I’ll hardly leave now, to live somewhere else I mean, and in a way its good. Its good to call it home again.
Even if whenever and whatever I am in the world, I am always describing Portugal, teaching about Portugal, showing Portugal, singing Portugal. That is what my life is about.

Beside the music and the country, there are some other passions though.
Reading is a well cared gift that I cuddle since childhood, where the unreal characters of a book, would play the part of real friends.
Time after, also the cinema, followed that pleasure, of the necessity of fulfilling the days with fantasy.

Nevertheless, the reality attaches itself to my skin, telling me true stories of pain and conquers.
And it is on the search of more humanity, I´m an utopic, that I cooperate with some associations:
Animal - to whom I owe the information that made me be a proud vegetarian
Unicef and Helpo - through which I sponsor children in Mozambique, first Amelia and now Altino.
And perhaps, because of the fragility of that other Amélia, my grandmother, who in the end of life was just a number in the hospital, who in the end of life was just a very small number on the social security, i got sensitized to volunteer for elderly people, and hardly anything gives me more pleasure then put them to sing when all they’ve been doing lately is to cry, or simply shop with them or patiently listen to their rich stories. So full of the life they are now denied.

The numerous travelling I´ve done so far, by singing or as a tourist, had made me conscious of different worlds inside the planet I inhabit.
The multi variety of cultures enchants my constant will of learning, and hopefully teaches me a posture of respect and will of understanding and solidarity as the only possible way for an efficient globalization.

Living in London, and that was the valuable part of it, with the friends I’ve known of multiple cultures and religions has forged in me those old convictions, with an ever bigger certainty.

My next CD, will certainly define a bit more of my will to ally the chant to the causes I pursue.

After all, those are the things that command my life.
And after all, my singing will always be my peaceful flag.

For that I have been composing and writing, without pretensions, just speaking from the heart. Another step along this path that I´ve traced with the unquestionable love to the art that defines me.
Being lucky, that despite the pessimism is a part of me as a characteristic of  my Portuguese condition, I always look at the bright side of the future. Always with hope.

Above everything, above me and my will, it stands this passion, so ethereal, so fragile, so sweet and so strong that is me, hiding inside of myself, and then leave myself and unmask me, there on the top of those boards full of significance, on that solitude and selfishness enormous, on that mix of fear and courage, of deliverance and refusal, of veracity and mystery.
If you knew what it is to look at an audience from a stage, when the stage is all ours and that mingling of shadows, as human as we are, came to see us.
If you could feel the sensation of shame and power those moments give us.
For the light of the spotlight is crude and false at the same time, shows the truth that really exists and the one the audience wants to see.
All that imposture masked as truth.
All that essence masked as delusion.
That is when my voice (if only always like that), already body and mind united makes me be me.