How Caetano Veloso Revolutionized Brazil’s Sound and Spirit

"Brazilians aren’t the only ones pulled in. Madonna once bowed down to him on a stage in São Paulo. David Byrne, who’s known Veloso since the eighties and has performed with him at Carnegie Hall, considers him an unclassifiable inspiration. “There’s this guy who’s got elements of Cole Porter and the Beatles and Bob Dylan, all these kinds of things that people might be familiar with,” he told me. “But that wouldn’t do it” to describe him. In addition to composing hundreds of his own songs, Veloso is known for idiosyncratic covers of Brazilian classics, Spanish-language boleros, themes from Italian cinema, and hits by Nirvana and Michael Jackson. He has recorded some fifty albums, and plays to sold-out theatres in Europe and the United States, to say nothing of Latin America, where he’s regarded as a fine artist and a pop celebrity.

He is soft-spoken, even shy. As a boy, he once wrote, “I was timid and extravagant.” He can seem suspiciously modest for a world-famous musician. Many of his contemporaries are technically superior, he’ll say. “But there is this more mysterious aspect” to his talent, he told me: “The atmosphere that comes with my voice.” He described it as “my presence, my personality,” which echoed an old song of his, called “Minha Voz, Minha Vida,” or “My Voice, My Life.” His liquid tenor, melodic and trance-like, is one of the most distinctive voices in music. Away from the microphone, he listens intently, and goes into languorous digressions full of references to books and films. The theatre director Peter Sellars has written of Veloso, “What if John Lennon was a world-class intellectual with an insatiable curiosity for Third World literature and a deep adoration for Hollywood cinema, as seen from the wrong end of a telescope? What if Stevie Wonder could see and he loved movies?”"

rea the piece by Jonathan Blitzer​

How Caetano Veloso Revolutionized Brazil’s Sound and Spirit | The New Yorker