On Caetano Veloso e Gal Costa - Domingo:

The sky is very blue today, and flat like paper. The sun is generous for the morning. I woke up with a strong urge to listen to Caetano*. I don't know exactly where these urges come from, except I feel it in my belly, where I guess most of my desires come from.

There aren't many albums I pull out from my college days. But I am fairly certain that this album is, will be, a life long love. I've been listening to Domingo (Sunday) for ten years now. It has born so many listens, and different periods in my life. For a music whore, who can fall in and out of love with an album in the space of two weeks, to continually love something for so long is somewhat remarkable.

I first heard it my freshman year in college, whilst lovemaking. Lovemaking as purely as I was capable at that time. The music felt perfect, and I asked him what it was afterwards, and studied the cover, the unfamiliar, unspellable words, so that I would know it at a glance, when I looked for it later.

I am sure that at the root of loving this music, there is a little bit in there that is about loving him. That relationship was perhaps the most peaceful I've had. Even leaving him was natural, and without a lot of pain. The time together was quite sweet, and I look at those three months quite fondly.

I spent months looking for the CD, and if you were to go to Amoeba or Rasputin or wherever looking for it, it may take a couple of tries, even now. I couldn't remember the name of the album, only the cover, vaguely, its colors. A black and white photograph of Gal Costa and Caetano Veloso, sitting below stairs, mid-conversation, Caetano looking at her, Gal looking over her shoulder at someone else, off camera. The photo is grainy, with lettering in flamingo pink and teal blue. I wonder if they were lovers at one time, or something like it. They look so comfortable together. Though I do think that when people make music together, it would be hard not to feel completely intimate with each other.

The album cover also looks ridiculously, amazingly indie-pop for something that was conceived almost forty-years before the word indie-pop was uttered. It could be a Belle and Sebastian cover (except better, of course).

It's just a bossanova disc from the mid-60s, and sounds like a series of wistful sighs. It is dreamy, it is mushy, it is pensive. There is something in the music that sounds like a person waiting for their love. It's very romantic.

The melodies are quite simple, nothing elaborate about them. And the record is rather short, thirty minutes long, and I remember wishing that it were longer when I first got the disc. Gal and Caetano trade off songs, and they both have such a sweetness in their singing, not like children, but capable of the same openness, idealism, hope. It sounds innocent, simplistic, but there is underlying complex emotion. It is not simple music.

It takes a certain amount of bravery to have hope, to be open like that.

I have a tendency to share Domingo with those I want to feel closer to, or to share something about myself that perhaps wouldn't be known otherwise. The album is like a secret I share. I play it for you if I like you.

But I've found it difficult to play Domingo for people, maybe I put too much pressure on people to listen to it, understand it, or need it the way I do. Or maybe this album is too quiet for our normal, social lives, with its superficial noise. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to give these people a copy, and leave them to listen in solitude, preferably on a sunny day, or to wait until they are in the middle of loving.

There is more I want to say on this, but I'm not sure how to put it down just yet.


* pronounced Kye-TAWN-o.