Lau Noah is a singer-songwriter from Reus, Spain who recently performed on NPR’s Tiny Desk series—a web series that showcases emerging and established musicians in a pared-down format similar to 90’s TV show, MTV Unplugged. Noah is multilingual and speaks Catalan, Spanish, English, and Hebrew. “There’s a language we speak in the Northeast of Spain called Catalan in a region called Catalonia, this is where I come from,” she said during her performance before delivering her song “L’Adéu (The Goodbye).” “And for many years I only sang in English because I was too scared of what they would say if I sang in my mother language. I’m not any more. I’m really happy to share a song in Catalan with you.” Noah is the first Catalan artist to play a Tiny Desk concert and sing in Catalan, and stated on her Facebook page, “Cultural diversity is the key to evolution, respect and peace.”
Before she played her final song, “Red Bird,” at the Tiny Desk, she quoted Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, from his novel Don Quixote: “When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies,” Lau said, reading from her notes. “Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams is madness. And maddest of all: to see life as it is and not as it should be.”
Noah got her break on Tiny Desk by submitting her song, La Realidad to the Tiny Desk Contest in 2018. Bob Boilen of NPR stated, “This is the sort of poetic tale that captured my heart amongst the thousands of entries I watched.”
Lau Noah can be found at her Facebook page
Check out her performance above, courtesy of NPR.
