Caetano Veloso
Meu Coco
Album - MPB, Music, Brazilian
The thing you have to wonder about Caetano Veloso’s 2021 album Meu Coco—or any album by a prominent artist cresting 80, really—is how they find the fortitude to keep going. Certainly he could ride into the sunset releasing live albums: 2004’s A Foreign Sound managed to cement him as both a lifelong radical (covers of Nirvana and the abrasive No Wave band DNA alongside Cole Porter and Irving Berlin) and a Beatles-like beacon for South America’s aging but cultured upper and middle class. And his 2020 set with clarinetist Ivan Sacerdote (Caetano Veloso & Ivan Sacerdote) is probably the closest he got to the revolutionary quiet of bossa nova creator João Gilberto. But what a gift Meu Coco is. Where his last string of studio albums—2006’s Cê, 2009’s Zii e Zie, and 2012’s exceptional Abraçaço—made him sound young, punky, and lean, Meu Coco gives you his full breadth: old-fashioned but playful orchestral folk (“Meu Coco”), modern hybrids of Brazilian dance and electronic music (“Não Vou Deixar”), reflections on the past (“GilGal” [if you know, you know]) and the present (“Enzo Gabriel,” which he says was influenced by learning what was, at the time, Brazil’s most popular boys’ name). The literal translation for meu coco is “my coconut”; the colloquial one is “my head” or “my mind.” Here, he shows you his all.
Meu Coco
Caetano Veloso
The thing you have to wonder about Caetano Veloso’s 2021 album Meu Coco—or any album by a prominent artist cresting 80, really—is how they find the fortitude to keep going. Certainly he could ride into the sunset releasing live albums: 2004’s A Foreign Sound managed to cement him as both a lifelong radical (covers of Nirvana and the abrasive No Wave band DNA alongside Cole Porter and Irving Berlin) and a Beatles-like beacon for South America’s aging but cultured upper and middle class. And his 2020 set with clarinetist Ivan Sacerdote (Caetano Veloso & Ivan Sacerdote) is probably the closest he got to the revolutionary quiet of bossa nova creator João Gilberto. But what a gift Meu Coco is. Where his last string of studio albums—2006’s Cê, 2009’s Zii e Zie, and 2012’s exceptional Abraçaço—made him sound young, punky, and lean, Meu Coco gives you his full breadth: old-fashioned but playful orchestral folk (“Meu Coco”), modern hybrids of Brazilian dance and electronic music (“Não Vou Deixar”), reflections on the past (“GilGal” [if you know, you know]) and the present (“Enzo Gabriel,” which he says was influenced by learning what was, at the time, Brazil’s most popular boys’ name). The literal translation for meu coco is “my coconut”; the colloquial one is “my head” or “my mind.” Here, he shows you his all.
