Attention Turns to Lamya, Poised on a Springboard

When Lamya, the latest discovery of music mogul Clive Davis, stepped onstage Wednesday night at the Viper Room in West Hollywood for an industry showcase, all the audience saw was a silhouette, as a single blinding spotlight shining from behind left her face obscured in shadow.

The flick of a switch quickly turned the front spots on, allowing most of those packed into the tiny club their first look at this highly touted singer, songwriter and producer.

But there’s another shadow on Lamya, one that may be a little tougher to remove.

Because she’s getting the biggest promotional push by Davis and his J Records label since their spectacular success last year with Alicia Keys, the Kenya-born, England-reared Lamya will be under intense scrutiny. That means the kind of early attention most freshman pop acts only dream about. It also brings heightened, perhaps impossible, expectations for her debut album, “Learning From Falling,” which arrives July 30.

Like Keys, whose debut album won five Grammy Awards and has sold 5.1 million copies in the U.S., Lamya writes, sings and produces most of what she records. Also reminiscent of her predecessor, she sings revealing, often confessional songs, favors melodic pop tinged with hip-hop rhythms and spent years in formal music training (as an opera singer). And just as it did for Keys, J is introducing Lamya to music industry tastemakers with special performances in key cities.

Davis and his staffers are confident that there are enough differences to mute any suggestions that Lamya arrives as Alicia, the Sequel.

“There’s always a risk of comparisons, but I think any comparisons in this case are downright silly,” says Davis. “You don’t say that because one artist broke through to 5 million that that’s the expectation and that we’ll be disappointed if another artist doesn’t do that. It’s very unfair to [Lamya’s] artistry. Alicia was her own, separate story.”

If there is any Alicia Keys fallout for Lamya, it could be a plus, according to Violet Brown, urban music buyer for the Wherehouse record store chain. “She’s a little different, and I think people right now are responding well to anything that’s different,” says Brown. “A lot of people are going to pay attention if Clive Davis is behind her, so it should do extremely well.”

Lamya herself is looking only at the upside of joining a roster of Davis discoveries stretching back more than three decades, including Whitney Houston, Janis Joplin, Barry Manilow and Santana.

“I haven’t had to sacrifice anything,” Lamya, 28, said at her hotel Wednesday, as a makeup artist prepared her for the Viper Room show. “The great thing about working on the album is that my sound has evolved but I’ve still got all the elements I wanted on it, without sounding like we threw in everything but the kitchen sink.”

Lamya’s globe-hopping background is responsible for the world-music sensibility that infuses many of her songs. Her parents moved from Kenya to England when she was a baby so she could go to school there, then moved back to their native Oman after she had finished her schooling.

So although Lamya’s affinity for snaking pop melodies and loping hip-hop beats makes her album easily accessible for pop fans, it quickly distinguishes itself from the modern R&B; pack with liberal doses of sitar and Indian and Middle Eastern percussion.

She credits Davis for giving her the freedom to create the sound she wanted. Before signing with J Records early last year, she had been paying dues during the ‘90s as a backup singer for such performers as James Brown, David Bowie and Duran Duran. She also sang on two albums by R&B; group Soul II Soul. What most appealed to her about Davis and his label was a request they made after hearing several demos she’d put together in the previous months.

“They wanted copies of the lyrics,” she says. “It was the only record company that bothered to ask for them, so I knew I was with the right people.”

What Davis found when he read those lyrics, he says, was “someone with a different sense of imagination, a depth, an introspection, not just a voice and a melody. There’s an honesty amid the poetry and a soulfulness combined with everything else that affects you.”

For her 35-minute performance Wednesday, Lamya offered “Empires,” which expresses her yearning for “men with empires in their purpose

Indeed, she cites Morissette, Tori Amos and Sarah McLachlan, rather than neo-soul singers such as Keys, Scott and India.Arie, as the contemporary performers with whom she feels most closely aligned.

That can be traced to a childhood spent listening to her parents’ record collection, which was full of the major rock and pop acts of the 1960s and ‘70s, from the Beatles, Bob Dylan and Pink Floyd to singer-songwriters Cat Stevens and James Taylor.

“There wasn’t much dance music or R&B; in the house, so I didn’t get much of that Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye stuff,” she says. “We had a bit of reggae, so I’ve always loved Bob Marley.” She acknowledged Marley’s impact Wednesday with a stripped-down reading of his “Redemption Song.”

She described Marley to the Viper Room crowd as “a guy who’s always been in my life, whose music usually came on when I was at my lowest ebb. So I wanted to sing this now, at a time when things couldn’t get any better.”