Brazil Music

The website has been neglected! I think this is just part of having a blog. It's been hard to find the time to write stuff this semester. When I did find the time, the stuff that I was writing about was extremely negative and bitter. I tried to explain consciousness and the universe, then I had a rant about what it means to have principles. Just some real dull stuff. So instead I am going to write about something that is not very serious or consequential, and is actually something that brings me joy, rather than despair. Bossa Nova music!!

One morning I was laying in bed scrolling reels and I got a reel with a song that was familiar but I did not know the name of it. I clicked on the audio to see the song name. Aguas De Marco. Only several weeks later I would realize the reason the song was familiar was because it was featured in Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie. Nonetheless, I thought the song was really catchy and enjoyable. I listened to the song obsessively over the next few days. It just so happened that those days were the warmest we'd had so far this year. I was going on walks! No winter jacket, just a sweater and I was listening to Aguas De Marco! Joyous. I enjoyed this song so much that wanted to learn it for myself on the guitar. At this point my acoustic guitar had only recently been tuned back to standard tuning after several years of grossly impractical freakish tunings. I was learning new chords. Very jazzy chords. Chords with so many letters and numbers in them. It all came to me fairly quickly, after all I've been playing guitar for 7 years now... I practiced the song so much. The song structure that initially seemed arbitrary and confusing slowly became muscle memory. My already heavily calloused finger tips were getting new blisters. My bluish green oxidized guitar strings were ripping layer after layer of skin off my fingers. Playing the song was more fun than listening to it. Despite the physical discomfort.

After what must have been almost two weeks of playing just one song, I felt ready to move on. The next song that came to me was Saudade Vem Correndo. This one had been in my mp3 library for about 2 years. I searched for a guitar tutorial on youtube, as this was how I learned Aguas De Marco. As it turns out there is not a tutorial on youtube. That's fine, I'll look up the chords online, I thought. Well, to my surprise there are no good sources for guitar chords or tabs online. I found one source that featured a tab based on a youtube cover of the song. I played along and learned that, however I noticed that around the 1-minute mark, the cover strays form the official recording of the song. That's no good. I began watching several guitar covers of the song online. None seemed faithful enough to the recording for me. I did stumble upon a video of a very old man playing it. His cover was played completely different from the one I had been learning. However, it sounded like it was a very faithful cover of the recording. I went to the comments of this 14 year old video and saw references to a website that the man had which hosted a pdf with the chords he was playing. To my dismay the website was no longer online. I used the internet archive to find an old archive of the website however I was unable to get the PDF. Eventually, I found a comment claiming to be the man, from a different account. It was a very recent comment so I looked at the profile. It was the same guy. I looked through the few posts on this new account and found a commenter asking for the chords for some of his other covers. He replied with his email address. Seeing this, I immediately cold emailed this 83 year old man asking if he would be willing to share with me the chords for Saudade Vem Correndo. Sure enough, the next morning at exactly 9:00am I recieved an email with 3 PDF attachments. Even with the chords in hand, it was still difficult to interpret. As of writing this I have put together my own version of the song borrowing elements of the first covers, and using chords that were provided to me through this email. All together, I feel I have a rendition that is very similar to the original recording. Thank you Bill Dee on youtube.

In the following weeks I have been adding song after song to what is becoming a Bossa Nova/Samba repertoire. After Saudade Vem correndo I learned Chega De Saudades. Then Corcovado. Each of those had relatively simple song structures and chords that were very easily accessible online. I learned each song in a night. Now as of writing this I am in the process of learning Samba De Uma Nota So. Finding chords that were faithful to the recording was more challenging however I was able to find a PDF on someones personal website. Its much more challenging than the other songs with very tricky chord shapes. I do feel like I am making good progress though. Through this whole process I have been joking that I want to become a Japan obsessed white person but instead for Brazil. The trope of learning Japanese to watch Anime is mirrored in me wanting to learn Portuguese for Bossa Nova and Samba. I've been reading about the most influential figures in Brazillian music, Tom Jobim, and Joao Gilberto, so on and so forth. As I do not yet have the ear, nor the patience to figure out these jazz chords by ear, the search for chords online has become a challenging, rewarding puzzle in and of itself. In a way I feel like some kind of online archeaologist digging through archives of websites, scans of long since out of print books, and sending long-shot emails in the hopes of getting my hands on now obscure guitar chords.

I've been at this for maybe a month at this point and I would like to keep building my brazilian music repertoire. This new interest has me playing the guitar more than I have in ages. At least for now its been my focus musically, as opposed to splitting my time between a million other instruments. These past weeks have seen me looking into real actual music training. Royal Conservatory stuff. I've been looking for teachers, and shopping for nylon stringed classical guitars. In a month I will hopefully be done university and these weeks have given me some insight into how I may be spending the start of my actual adult life. Today I even changed the bluish-green strings on my guitar. That's serious.

Samba

This is the official companion piece to the interests blog post about Brazillian Music. I don't really have much to write about it other than it's awesome I enjoy it greatly. I figure I will just include links to some of the songs I have been learning on guitar and by extension listening to hundreds of times over and over.

First up, the one that kicked this off for me. Aguas De Marco - Tom Jobim & Elis Regina [Link]

I don't know what there is to say about this song other than it rules. I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that it literally won nation wide votes for best song in brazillian history.

Up next, Saudade Vem Correndo - Stan Getz & Luiz Bonfa [Link]

On every guitar cover I watched for this song the comments are always people referencing the legacy its had. It's been featured as a sample in a lot of songs. I think the original is pretty great though.

Number 3, Corcovado - Tom Jobim, Joao Gilberto & Astrud Gilberto [Link]

Ok so fun fact I guess, the singer at the start of this song was married to the other singer for a little bit. In reading about them I stumbled upon a very old looking archive of the official website for Astrud. It looks like she was a really big animal rights advocate for her entire life. Her website is here and I suggest looking through it. There are lots of photos of her over the years with lots of very influential bossa nova people. Also an art section with some, um, sort of peculiar ms paint looking drawings. The website sorta just bursts with personality.

Its getting very late and I am becoming very tired so to round off the list we have Chega De Saudades - Tom Jobim [Link] and Samba De Uma Nota So - Tom Jobim [Link to Live Version because sure]

Alright that's all I got.

More Music!

I started recording full length original songs using a guitar in October of 2020. I was in grade 12 and was just about to turn 17. This started a 2-3 year period where I was constantly making new songs. You could call this my most prolific creative era. I was making about 40 songs per year? I never considered any of them to be finished or "real" songs that people would listen to. In the back of my head I always just viewed them as practice and each song was a step towards one day making something to a finished, "real" level of quality. I'm not sure if I ever really reached that point but over the years as I got better I had loftier expectations for the quality of my songs and recordings. Little did I know, pursuing this would turn recording into an unreasonably major task. Suddenly writing and recording a song turned from something I could do in a single day, into something that took weeks or months of trial and error. The finished product got a lot better but it became more a lot more trouble that it was really worth especially considering an increasing workload in school, jobs, relationships, etc. I don't think I will ever say I'm done with music, because I think saying that would cause some kind of serious crisis or ego death as this really was my whole life for a very long time. But yeah, the dream of doing this in a professional context is certainly not on my mind to the extent that it was a few years ago. That's not to say that was ever really my goal. My goal right from the start was just to have something that, in the future I can look back on. From this perspective I have absolutely achieved what I wanted to and then some. Over the years I have always had these songs available to me privately and I would revisit them every so often. I get a lot of value even from the oldest ones. I'll hear something in a horrible, noisy recording that makes me stop in awe that I did this. I think it's really unlikely that I will ever reach the same level of output that I was able to achieve at 17, but I would like to at least have a few "unfinished" recordings every year. I've never been someone that takes photos. Not to diminish the value of photos but I don't think looking at a photo holds a candle to listening to a song you made years and years ago. I can very vividly remember where I was and what was going on in my life when I listen to most of them. These songs are the closest thing I have to a scrapbook and I hope to add to it throughout my life.

Click the photo to go to the bandcamp page. It's all free.

If you are already on this website I think it's safe to assume you at least vaguely know of me. That's really the best case scenario.

This website is a place for me to practice sincerity. That's my understanding of it right now at least. I'm not making any effort for the writings here to be perceived in any way, they are very much just straight from my head.

This is effectively a journal of sorts. Only made public. Mostly I just write about things that interest me. Opinions. I wouldn't consider this a website of any serious societal value. The only thing you can learn about on here is me. But I think that's okay. I know the value that I get out of it at least, and I'm the one paying for the domain name at the end of the day.

Genuinely everything on this website is an invitation for a discussion. I like writing about things but I love talking about things with people way more. If I write something on here and you disagree I want to hear about it. Or if you have something you think I should see or a song you think I should hear, tell me.

Maybe that's the point of this website.

Anyway, below is Nick Mullen. My hero.