Dance Tranquil
An ode to Thievery Corporation
i lie in this meadow petals hushing my mind now blue shade from canopy
soil perfume orchestrates insects humming on leaves blooming lush melody of wistful release
unfolded and shimmering i sway and propagate this feast of heart tumbling out
Notes: Inspired by Thievery Corporation’s Saudade on their album by the same name. I have been ignoring Pitchfork’s accusation the group spins lifestyle music for a few decades. Pitchfork will shit all over what it already praised anyway. My dear readers who are looking at my daily bossa nova posts clearly understand the value of the genre despite its similar accusation of “lounge music”.
Thievery Corporation re-introduce forgotten sounds and make an atmosphere where you can soak in different moods and find some rhythm for your heart. Astute listeners will research any group’s borrowings and when I researched Thievery Coporation’s, I fell in more deeply in love with Bossa Nova and was introduced to Delroy Wilson.(In all honesty it was Annette Funicello who introduced a very weird teen, out of her time, to bossa nova).
While Thievery will sometimes only touch on bossa nova in a track or two per album, in 2014, they dedicated an entire album to bossa nova and the Brazilian concept of saudade (longing) where critics rightly praised them for mixing rich and organic instrumental sounds within the genre of electronica, explaining:
many others treat Brazilian music as a stereotype (generic beach music or foreplay accompaniment), Thievery regards it as something fundamental: a global unifier, an essence that can signify nuanced emotions…. Brazilians talk about saudade as a mood that just comes along and takes over one’s emotional landscape, with waves of cascading disappointment melting into wistful, brokenhearted reflection. It’s one of those things you feel first, and ponder its component parts later. That can be extremely difficult to translate into music, but Thievery Corporation does just that on Saudade.
The lyrics.
The album was intended to be enjoyed as a movement and this poem was inspired by the album as a whole. Here is the full album.
Written for the July Summer Music Challenge where I wrote a poem or story about bossa nova for 31 days. See below for all entries including Terry Barr’s 8 brilliant memoirs about summer and music: