Meu Coco

The thing you have to wonder about Caetano Veloso’s 2021 album *Meu Coco*—or any album by a prominent artist cresting 80, really—is how they find the fortitude to keep going. Certainly he could ride into the sunset releasing live albums: 2004’s *A Foreign Sound* managed to cement him as both a lifelong radical (covers of Nirvana and the abrasive No Wave band DNA alongside Cole Porter and Irving Berlin) and a Beatles-like beacon for South America’s aging but cultured upper and middle class. And his 2020 set with clarinetist Ivan Sacerdote (*Caetano Veloso & Ivan Sacerdote*) is probably the closest he got to the revolutionary quiet of bossa nova creator João Gilberto. But what a gift *Meu Coco* is. Where his last string of studio albums—2006’s *Cê*, 2009’s *Zii e Zie*, and 2012’s exceptional *Abraçaço*—made him sound young, punky, and lean, *Meu Coco* gives you his full breadth: old-fashioned but playful orchestral folk (“Meu Coco”), modern hybrids of Brazilian dance and electronic music (“Não Vou Deixar”), reflections on the past (“GilGal” \[if you know, you know\]) and the present (“Enzo Gabriel,” which he says was influenced by learning what was, at the time, Brazil’s most popular boys’ name). The literal translation for *meu coco* is “my coconut”; the colloquial one is “my head” or “my mind.” Here, he shows you his all.