Caetano Veloso

Caetano Veloso is among the most influential and beloved artists to emerge from Brazil, where he began his musical career in the 1960s. Absorbing musical and aesthetic ideas from sources as diverse as The Beatles, concrete poetry, the French Dadaists, and the Brazilian modernist poets of the 1920s, Veloso – together with Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, his sister Maria Bethânia, and a number of other poets and intellectuals – founded the Tropicália movement and permanently altered the course of his country’s popular music. Caetano continues to be a major musical, social, and cultural force in Brazil, and an influential figure to musicians all over the world. The New York Times calls him “one of the greatest songwriters of the century.”

Caetano is now back with new album Meu Coco, which is set to be a journey inside the artist’s head, showing how his brain works while creating his songs. In his own words:

“It’s been nine years since I released an album of new songs. At the end of 2019, I felt a strong desire to record new material on my own. It all started with a beat on the guitar that seemed to outline something that (if performed as I dreamed) would sound original to any audience anywhere in the world. The song “Meu Coco” was the result of this, and by adding to the outlined beat a melody with the selections of Brazilian women’s names, it cut a samba rhythm into simplified and hard cells. I hoped to find the right tone quality to turn this dream riff into a concrete novelty. And I was sure that the rhythm, its sound, and its function would only be definitively embodied if the dancers of the Folkloric Ballet of Bahia created gestures based on what was outlined on the guitar. With that, I would figure out the tone quality and everything else. But 2020 came along, the coronavirus received the name Covid-19, and I was stuck in Rio, postponing my trip to Bahia to talk to the dancers. Would it wait a few months?

Over a year went by and after having composed songs that seemed to be born from “Meu Coco,” I needed to start recording in my home studio.”