Mariza doesn't simply sing sad songs. She goes much further than that. She sings songs about sorrow, about solitude, about the longing that resides in the deepest part of our hearts. Can you handle the truth? The truth that hurts? Then Mariza, an angel of Portugal, is a singer who speaks your language.

Mariza's song — her melancholy form — is known as the fado. She would want you to understand this, most of all, before any other trivialities relating to her career or her talent. Think of fado as the blues of Portugal, centuries old. Fado is as blue as the sea beyond Lisbon, blue as its famous azulejo tiles, blue as her country's broken dreams of colonial grandeur.

In its purest form, fado is spare, acoustic: a solitary voice, a 12-string acoustic guitar. The word "fado" is derived from the Latin fatum, meaning fate. Longing and destiny are its guiding concepts. It is believed that fado contains the echoes of sentimental ballads sung by Portuguese seafarers and the sighs of Angolan slaves bemoaning their fate. Like American blues, or Spanish flamenco, fado is music of feeling.

Mariza feels the essence of fado — and more than that, she shares it with extraordinary grace. Upon the release of her debut album, "Fado Em Mim," in late 2001, Mariza instantly won renown as one of the great young vocalists in world music. Critics adore her command of timbre and timing. But it's Mariza's love of form, her emotional connection to fado, that is at the heart of her allure.

Born in Mozambique, Mariza was raised in the Lisbon neighborhood of Mouraia, a spot that is to fado what New Orleans is to jazz. Her parents ran a restaurant in an area known for its "fado houses." As a girl, Mariza felt the power of the fado before she could even read. As an adult, she's often compared to the late, legendary Amália Rodriques renowned as the Queen of Fado from the late 1930s until her death in 1999.

Mariza, who covers several Amalia standards in her own style, does not shy from the comparison. Both singers have magical styles. Some of Amalia's most powerful songs have a jagged immediacy to them. They have a stinging force. Mariza, in contrast, sings with an alluring fluidity, suggesting the ocean. Her songs have swells and currents. . . . The power is not always so overt.

"I was made for fado," she sings in the opening song of "Fado em Mim," wrapping her voice around the lyrics of Portuguese poets Julio Campos Sousa and Frederico de Brito:

That my voice

Is so mournful

Is the fault of all of you

The poets in my life

It's madness

I have heard it said

But blessed is the madness

To sing and to live.

There's no way around it: Fado is a strikingly earnest musical style. There's nothing escapist about it. Fado makes no mention of party girls or fast cars or indulgence. The only material references in classic fado are of oceans and harbors, boats and guitars. Even modern fado — Mariza's fado — is a million miles removed from, say, the look-at-me excesses of a Super Bowl halftime.

As fado is music anchored in tradition, it is also a music that soothes in these troubled international times. One of the chief ideas in fado, for example, is how small we are in the world. Fado accepts longing and loss as inevitable and essential. There is no escaping pain. For all our desire to control our environment, we are powerless before the larger forces of nature and destiny. Yet fado — like the blues — implies that we might find strength in this understanding. In the song, there is solace.

"When I'm singing, I don't see anything. I'm feeling. I'm feeling everything," Mariza said recently in an interview on National Public Radio. "If you breathe, if you're crying, I feel everything in the audience. But I don't see it. I'm just working with the feelings."