O Leaozinho

O LEAOZINHO [Recorded live in concert]

Music and lyrics: Caetano Veloso. Guitar and vocals: Ed Hale. Bass guitar: Stro. Recorded at The Forge, Miami Beach, FL 2002.

O Leaonzinho is another popular Brasilian classic. One of the most famous and beloved songs of all time in Brasil and one of the most favored of Caetano’s mammoth 40 year catalogue. I will be the first to admit that we had no business attempting to cover this song and I absolutely destroy the lyrics in this performance. Something I can easily hear now years later. But we had a large Brasilian fanbase at the time Rise and Shine was released due to our performing various Brasilian songs in the two years prior to that album coming out. People were intrigued by our attempt to fuse Western pop and rock with various different world musics when we first put the band together and we wanted to honor our love for world music and give a nod to what Brasilian music meant to us. We had recorded So quero um xodo fusing it with the Beatle’s All you need is love for the Rise and Shine CD and knew we were going to perform it at the CD release party. At the last minute we decided that as an encore Stro and I would walk out just the two of us and lay down this tender classic as a way of honoring all our Brasilian fans in the audience that night. It is a beautiful song. The problem was that I was nervous as hell in that moment and all the hours I had spent rehearsing and memorizing the lyrics to the song escaped me. My head just went empty. Luckily the audience knew the lyrics and sang along and clapped and managed to salvage the moment a bit. One day I was talking to a buddy of mine about the song and asked him how badly my accent sounded on the song and he very politely answered that “yes, you can hear that you are American by your accent bro. But the people don’t look badly on that. If anything they feel happy that you like the music so much that you would even try to record it.” And that in a nutshell is what makes the Brasilian people some of the nicest soulful people that you could ever meet.

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