As a songwriter of supreme resourcefulness and extraordinary wit, Caetano Veloso knows where to find the most superb melodies in life. The quiet centerpiece of the 79-year-old’s latest album was inspired by the bedtime vocalizations of his newest grandchild, now 17 months old, who learned to sing himself to sleep. The song is called “Autoacalanto” — “self-lullaby” — and Veloso is more than happy to imitate his grandson’s sleepy vowels over a video call from his living room in Rio de Janeiro: Ou-ah-ahh! Ou-ah-ahh!
“That was astonishing,” Veloso says of hearing it for the first time. “He would sing until he fell asleep!” Even more astonishing was news from Veloso’s daughter-in-law that her friend’s infant does the same thing. Same for the child of Carminho, the Portuguese fado singer whom Veloso duets with on this new record. “Well, this is a generational phenomenon,” Veloso says, his pixelated smile beaming wisdom and delight through the computer screen.
So much of Veloso’s songbook lives at that contact point between human intimacy and societal shift. He’s renowned for kick-starting tropicalia, one of the most vibrant musical protest movements in history — a style-slash-ethos in which Veloso and his compatriots met the brutality of Brazil’s rising military dictatorship in the 1960s with playfulness, tenderness, imagination and grace. The highly omnivorous music of the tropicalistas combined the delicate vitality of bossa nova with the electric zest of the Beatles to such dazzling effect, the sound got Veloso and fellow songwriter Gilberto Gil exiled in 1969. After a few lonely years in London, they returned home as national superstars committed to Brazil’s democratic future.
And with Brazil’s election of far-right president Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, Veloso has made it clear that his commitment will not waver. “Having a military government is awful and Bolsonaro is so confused, so incompetent,” Veloso told the Guardian last year amid the Brazilian president’s flagrant undermining of the environment and education, as well as his botched response to the coronavirus pandemic. “. . . There’s been no government — just a racket of insanities.”
Bolsonaro isn’t monopolizing Veloso’s brainspace, though. This new album — unsurprisingly gorgeous, adventurously polyrhythmic, sung in Portuguese, recorded while quarantined in his home studio — is titled “Meu Coco.” The face-value translation is “My Coconut,” but Veloso offers a more precise read while gently rapping his knuckles on the side of his head: “ ‘My Noggin.’ ”
These days, it’s filled with ideas about race, technology, the sensation of watching sunlight bounce across a body of water and more. One especially sumptuous song, “Enzo Gabriel,” cites the most popular name for newborn boys in Brazil in 2018 and 2019 as evidence of a national hivemind, or maybe even a collective subconsciousness. Veloso thinks he understands the popularity of “Enzo” — he says a famous Brazilian actress had given her child that name — “but who put it together with Gabriel, I don’t know,” he says. “So it’s a song directed to one person who is called Enzo Gabriel, and he is asked, ‘What will be your role in the salvation of the world?’ ”
In a world of endless questions, Veloso sometimes worries he’s written too many songs — but not too much. “To like songs is to like quantity,” Veloso says, reciting a new mantra of his, and “with the Internet and streaming, every Friday, lots of songs are launched. . . . There’s some pleasure in living in the quantity, but of course, one has to be able to have a criterion, a perspective. And it’s more difficult to have a perspective and a criterion nowadays than it used to be.”
Promiscuous yet principled. That’s clearly one of the most wonderful paradoxes in Veloso’s songwriting. But if you try to bend all of his music around one singular idea, one signature virtue, it might look something like optimism. Across 50-plus years, through all of its wild shapes and prismatic iterations, Veloso’s music has routinely refused the notion of despair.
“I don’t feel attracted to being like that,” he explains. “I also programmatically choose some kind of optimism, because cynicism, and even pessimism, free you from responsibility.” To Veloso, without “a stubborn optimism” in Brazil, the world would have never experienced the bossa nova of João Gilberto, or the films of Glauber Rocha, or the revolutionary pop of the tropicalistas. His idea here feels vast, and simple, and true: Art can help people feel “responsible for their future and the future of their society.”
In that light, Veloso’s lullabies and protest anthems suddenly seem to bind together so tightly, they almost become one and the same. Both types of songs seek to comfort us as we move into the unknowable. So maybe it isn’t totally absurd to ask Veloso the biggest question there is: What does he think happens when we die?
Perhaps at a loss, he smiles, unbothered. “I don’t know,” Veloso says. “I’ve never died.”
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