Sixty Years in Twenty Songs
The playlist opens in 1963 with Jorge Ben and closes in 2024 with Liniker. In between: the album that named Tropicália, a samba written by a man who waited until he was 65 to record one, a protest song that walked straight past the dictatorship's censors, the Recife movement that wired maracatu drums to distortion pedals, São Paulo rap, and whatever it is that is coming out of Brazil right now.
Falando Mixtape #1 is our first attempt at that in one sitting. Twenty songs, ordered loosely by era rather than strictly by date, weighted towards the ones Brazilians can still sing at each other across a table.
It is also on Tidal and as a YouTube playlist, same twenty tracks in the same order.
One thing worth noticing before you press play: in Brazilian music the person who wrote the song and the person singing it are very often two different people, and nobody treats that as the lesser version. Caetano wrote "Baby" and Gal Costa owns it. Candeia wrote "Preciso Me Encontrar" and it belongs to Cartola. Three of these twenty are old songs picked up and re-recorded decades later by artists who had no hand in writing them, and in each case the later version is the one the country kept.
Tracks 1 to 11: The Canon
- Baby — Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso. Caetano wrote it, Gal sang it into history, and it landed on Tropicália: ou Panis et Circensis in 1968, the album that gave a movement its name. The lyric instructs the listener: você precisa aprender inglês — you need to learn English. Track one of a Portuguese playlist. We kept it anyway.
- Mas, Que Nada! — Jorge Ben Jor. From his 1963 debut, exported worldwide by Sergio Mendes three years later, and still the most misread title in Brazilian music. Mas que nada [mahz kee NAH-dah] does not mean "but that nothing." It means "no way," "forget it," "come off it." He added the "Jor" decades later, reportedly because his royalties kept landing in George Benson's account.
- Tudo O Que Você Podia Ser — Milton Nascimento. Written by Lô and Márcio Borges for Clube da Esquina (1972), the double album a group of friends from Minas Gerais made and Brazil never quite got over. The title is one imperfect verb doing enormous work: everything you could have been.
- Preciso Me Encontrar — Cartola. Cartola helped found the Mangueira samba school in the 1920s and did not record a solo album until he was 65. This one, written by Candeia, arrived on Cartola II in 1976 and sounds exactly like a man with that much life behind him. Preciso me encontrar — I need to find myself.
- Brasil Pandeiro — Novos Baianos. Assis Valente wrote it in 1940 for Carmen Miranda, who listened and told him it was no good. Thirty-two years later the Novos Baianos cut it for Acabou Chorare at João Gilberto's suggestion — the only song on the record they did not write themselves — and it became a standard.
- O Descobridor Dos Sete Mares — Tim Maia. Tim Maia spent his youth in the United States and came home with soul music in his luggage, then spent a career welding it onto Brazilian pop. The 1983 title track means "the discoverer of the seven seas," which is more or less how he carried himself.
- Apesar De Você — Chico Buarque. The censor who cleared this in 1970 took it for a song about a bad relationship. It sold over 100,000 copies in three months before somebody in the dictatorship worked out who você was, at which point it was banned and the remaining records destroyed. Apesar de [ah-peh-ZAR jee] means "in spite of."
- Não Deixe O Samba Morrer — Alcione. Alcione's breakthrough, from 1975, written by Edson Conceição and Aloísio Silva. Half a century on, it is still the reliable test of whether a room full of Brazilians is going to start singing.
- Bicicleta — Marcos Valle. Valle wrote "Samba de Verão," which the English-speaking world knows as "Summer Samba," and then, rather than dine out on it forever, spent the eighties making boogie records. Also bicicleta is a free vocabulary word and you have already learned it.
- O Tempo Não Pára — Cazuza. Cazuza was seriously ill with AIDS when he recorded this in 1988, and died two years later at 32. A small spelling note: the 2009 orthographic reform scrapped the accent that separated pára (the verb) from para (the preposition), so the title is now technically "O Tempo Não Para." Every album cover in Brazil ignores this.
- Evidências — Chitãozinho & Xororó. The 1990 sertanejo ballad that operates as Brazil's second national anthem after midnight. There is a whole post on what it teaches you, because it teaches a surprising amount.
Tracks 12 to 14: The Loud Part
- Maracatu Atômico — Chico Science & Nação Zumbi. Jorge Mautner and Nelson Jacobina wrote it in 1974; Chico Science took it in 1996 and ran it through mangue beat, the Recife movement that plugged traditional maracatu drums into rock and hip-hop. He died in a car crash the following year, at 30, which is why every mangue beat record still sounds like a beginning.
- Vida Loka, Pt. 1 — Racionais MC's. São Paulo rap from 2002, and comfortably the hardest Portuguese here: fast, slangy, regional, entirely unbothered by whether you are keeping up. That is why it is on the list. At some point you have to hear the language at full speed and unsweetened.
- Tempo Perdido — Legião Urbana. Brasília, 1986. Renato Russo wrote lines that a whole generation of Brazilians can still produce on demand, which is not a claim you can make about many songs in any language.
Tracks 15 to 20: What's Still Happening
- Chocolate — Ana Frango Elétrico. From Little Electric Chicken Heart (2019). Rio, loose-limbed and funny, and good evidence that the tradition has not hardened into a museum.
- Último Romance — Los Hermanos. Written by Rodrigo Amarante for Ventura in 2003. Amarante later wrote and sang "Tuyo," the Narcos theme, so plenty of people know his voice without knowing his name. The band went on hiatus in 2007 and their reunion shows still sell out in minutes.
- volta e meia — O Terno, Devendra Banhart, Shintaro Sakamoto. Tim Bernardes's band holding the door open in 2019 for a singer working in Spanish and a Japanese songwriter working in Japanese. The title is the lesson: volta e meia means "every now and then."
- TRADUÇÃO — Black Pantera. A Black hardcore trio from Uberaba, in Minas Gerais. Bassist Chaene da Gama wrote this one on Perpétuo (2024) for his mother, Dona Guiomar, about the grinding daily routine of Black Brazilian mothers. The quietest song they have and the loudest thing on the record.
- CAJU — Liniker. Liniker became the first trans woman to win a Latin Grammy in 2022, and Caju (2024) is the album that followed. A caju [kah-ZHOO] is the cashew fruit, the yellow-red thing on the tree; the nut you already know is the castanha de caju hanging off the bottom of it.
- Várias Queixas — Gilsons. Olodum recorded it first, back in 2012. Then José Gil and his nephews Francisco and João — son and grandsons of Gilberto Gil — reworked it in 2019 and turned a regional Bahian hit into the song coming out of every car in Brazil each January. Sixty years after track two, the family business is still open.
Press Play
Twenty songs, sixty years, one afternoon. Somewhere around track eleven you will notice you are following more of the lyrics than you expected, which is the good kind of surprise.
When you want to test that on speech rather than singing, Real Talk plays you twenty seconds of real Brazilian audio and asks one question you answer in Portuguese, pitched at your level. Same ear, no melody to lean on.
Bora? Start free on Falando.
