Ana Moura

Since her album Casa Guilhermina (2023), Portugal’s most well-known Fadista has been exploring new musical paths, integrating electronic sounds and African rhythms into her Fado program. No other popular Fado singer has transformed it as radically as Ana Moura.

Having already risen to pop stardom ten years ago with her album Desfado, becoming a close friend of Prince who admired her, sharing the stage with the Rolling Stones, and performing in the most renowned concert halls around the world, the pandemic offered Ana Moura a welcome break from a high-speed career. She remembered the music she had heard at home: her mother Angolan and her father Portuguese, and began to visit dance clubs and small live venues in Lisbon, where she met young musicians, often from Africa or part of the electronic music scene. Then she began to write her own songs, something that rarely happens in the career of a Fado singer!

Together with the young producers Pedro Mafama and Pedro Da Linha, Ana Moura wrote and recorded Casa Guilhermina in an intense, creative process, a modern pop album that brings together the tradition of Fado with African genres like Semba, Morna & Kizomba and Brazilian sounds such as Samba and Choro. The album is characterized by auto-tune, R&B textures, and Kizomba beats, but also includes reinterpretations of classical Fados and traditional Angolan songs. Casa Guilhermina is the name of Ana Moura’s house near Lisbon, where she was finally able to spend a lot of time without constantly being on tour, and where, over the course of months in a liberating, creative process, she rediscovered her Angolan roots. It is named after her grandmother, who sang Fado and danced to Angolan music, and who deeply inspired Ana Moura.

Her current live program includes Ana Moura and three musicians, as well as dancers.