Naree is back in fighting form

Life can be ironic; it's hard to imagine experiencing a pulmonary embolism when you have trouble pronouncing the words.

Rebecca Londei, or Naree to her fans, is now 18 and you could easily be fooled by her youthful face and super-lively persona that she was just another teenager going through the awkward years.

But the singer-songwriter has been through ovarian cancer, surgery, kidney failure, chemotherapy and that pulmonary embolism she charmingly struggled to pronounce.

"It was a week after my 14th birthday. They call ovarian cancer the silent killer because the symptoms

are very minor until very late," Naree said.

"I had a petite figure at the time, but strangely enough I was gaining weight, but more so just on my stomach so it looked like I was pregnant, which is odd because I was only 14. I had a CAT scan, and it was a tumour."
 
Emergency surgery

An emergency surgery that night revealed that the seven-kg tumour was so big that it was touching Naree's vital organs, and doctors therefore could not remove it.

Naree and her family went to the United Kingdom for treatment, and after the second chemotherapy session her veins collapsed from being prodded too often.

The night before her third session she had a pulmonary embolism and remained in intensive care for 10 days.

Finally, after surgery that lasted almost seven hours, the watermelon-sized tumour was removed from Naree's little body.

It has been four years since that ordeal, and Naree is back in fighting form, pursuing her passion, music.

"I didn't really think much about everything that happened, except I expressed a lot of it through my music," says Naree, a Thai name meaning "young lady", Rebecca's middle name.

"I think that is how the whole music thing really started to take place. I was writing before I was diagnosed with cancer, but at 14 years old, what do you know about life to sing about?"

Obviously when I got sick it gave me something with meaning to sing about. My music became more mature and it wasn't the typical music you would hear from a 14-year-old. My music is very personal and very much based around my life."

Pain-tinged voice

The classically-trained pianist and self-taught guitarist creates her own kind of pop rock, and sings with a sweet, crystalline, sometimes pain-tinged voice.

Her songs alternate between moving ballads and pop-infused fun beats, but her voice is always reminiscent of the likes of Michelle Branch and Lisa Loeb.
 
Naree's lyrics are attention-grabbing, often imbued with disconcerting courage.

On the song Blame, the words "I'm not afraid to die 'cause death is the one who ran away from me" offer a glimpse into the darker side of Naree. "When I write, it just comes," she says.

"I try to come up with not so obvious lyrics, and I try to put a little wisdom in there. When I try to think of clever lyrics, they come out tacky and clichéd. When I'm not thinking, then it works."

Naree's sound has found success both in the UAE and abroad. She plays sets every Wednesdays and Thursdays at a local Starbucks, and also performs at any cancer-related event she hears of.

Just last summer, Naree went to the United States for three months and toured the East Coast, promoting her music and playing in local coffee shops.

All the money she collects from album or merchandise sales goes to her Pick Life foundation, Naree's cancer foundation.

She is also a supporter of the Teenage Cancer Trust in the UK, and sends cheques to them regularly.

Here in Abu Dhabi, Naree will perform at the Terry Fox Run for the second year in a row this year.

A special Naree compilation made for the Terry Fox event will be sold for Dh15 throughout the day, as well as her previous albums, I'm No Fool, released in 2003, and Proud, released in 2004.

Naree stresses that every penny made from her sales goes to charity.

Third album

Having graduated from high school last May, Naree is currently enjoying a gap year.

By the coming September, she will enrol at Berkeley College in Boston to major in music and songwriting.

A third album is currently in the works, and Naree already has over 40 songs to choose from.

She is taking her time picking and choosing the songs she wants to appear on the third album and wants her third effort to include a little bit of everything.

Naree mostly writes from her personal experiences but also likes to write songs based on other people's lives, and is also inspired by things such as literature.

One of her upcoming songs, Broken String, was written for a school project revolving around Anne Rice's novel The Violin.

Very optimistic

As Naree's Heaven In This World comes on softly in the background in the quiet coffee shop where we are chatting, she takes a minute to formulate how she would describe her experience so far.

"I would say it's different in a way. I'm sure a lot of other people get cancer as well, so I won't say my life is special. I don't feel angry, I'm not mad that I got sick; I don't resent anyone for it. I'm very positive anyway; I've always been very optimistic. However when I came back from being sick, it made me realise how overdramatic a lot of people can be sometimes."

"Especially at the time, when I came back to school, I'd be in class listening to what other people are talking about, girls thinking their lives were ruined because their boyfriends left them or girls who would self-mutilate."
 
"All those things became pointless to me, although I don't know if I hadn't gotten sick if I would have been like that. It just opened my eyes that some things aren't as bad as they seem."

"When bad stuff happens, I don't tend to freak out as some people would. I'm more laid back, but don't get me wrong, I still do have my fits!"