the second most recorded song in history
Is it also weird?
The song entered my ears recently while having a lovely dinner with my wife in a tourist zone. As you might imagine, it is a familiar song to anyone. At first it blended in with the other themed songs for this particular tourist location. The fact that it was being played live from a piano bar gave it a bit of a twist. We were in such a good mood that we hummed along a bit before I asked my wife if she remembered the version that I love. Thinking about that version got it playing in my head, and it wasn’t going to stop until I could actually hear it.
The song is “The Girl From Ipanema”, and I would soon find out that it is the second most recorded song in history. There is some debate about this, but the fact that it ranks so high was a bit of a surprise to me.
I made a few token efforts to look up MY version, but not wanting to diminish the mood my wife and I were enjoying, we simply went back to guessing the next few songs that came from the piano bar as we waited for dinner. When we couldn’t guess, I’d let Google try by asking it “what song is this”. Google would listen for a bit and then give an answer … or not. It seems the versions being played by this live pianist were just off enough to confuse Google. Score one for the pianist.
“The Girl From Ipanema” is a song that is so ubiquitous you hardly notice it when it shows up in the background of whatever you happen to be doing. I don’t remember really listening to the song until I found it on a compilation CD that was released in 1989. I’m not sure when I acquired it, but it was probably within a year or two of its release. I don’t buy many compilation records, but I wrote a story a year ago about the most important record in my collection, and it too is a compilation record.
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When we got back to our hotel room in the tourist zone, I wasted no time looking up MY version of the song. I really wanted to get it out of my head where it was now playing over and over. But I didn’t have much to go on. I couldn’t remember the name of the compilation CD or the artist that did the song. I could only remember the song. What stood out about it, in my mind, was how weird sounding that version was. The basic melody and rhythm of the original was there, but it was slightly off, kind of like the way the person at the piano bar was playing it, but even more off than that. The tempo would speed up and slow down, and the melody and vocals would briefly go barely off key. It was enough to get my attention, but not enough to ruin the beauty of the song. For me, it made the song even more beautiful. And now, there it was, stuck in my head with no relief in sight in my vain attempts to look it up.
By now my wife had gone to sleep, and I was deep into this rabbit hole. Trying to describe to Google what was playing in my head was getting me results, but not the song. One of the results grabbed me. The title of the YouTube video says it all: “The Girl From Ipanema is a far weirder song than you thought”. Really? Maybe MY version wasn’t so weird after all. Maybe the weirdness was built into the song right from the beginning.
The Girl From Ipanema is a far weirder song than you thought:
This video explanation of the song is fascinating. It goes into a lot of music theory that I don’t understand, but I had enough music lessons in my youth that I at least know what he’s talking about, even if the details are way over my head. And he doesn’t linger on those details. He plays them. So you can hear what he’s talking about, which makes sense to anyone who listens to music. The history of the song alone is fascinating enough. This 33 minute video was over before I knew it. I now want to find a 2 hour documentary on “The Girl From Ipanema”.
With MY version still going on in my head, I still thought it must be much weirder than what Google was able to find for me. I would have to wait until we got home from the tourist zone to find out.
The day after we got home, I easily found the CD in my small collection of compilations. I hadn’t listened to it in many years, but seeing the artwork brought back a flood of memories. There are 20 tracks on the CD. I went straight for track 14. Turns out it’s called “The Boy From Ipanema” which by now I knew was a fairly common modification made by the many cover versions of the song. As soon as it started playing, my mind was salivating for the weirdness to kick in. It’s only a 3 minute song, and it was over without sounding very weird. Had my memory distorted it that much? Has my taste changed? It was definitely the song playing in my head in the tourist zone. I put the CD aside to listen to the rest of it later in the day.
The CD is called Drive to Heaven, Welcome to Chaos. It was assembled by a small Japanese label and includes contributions from musicians from Japan, Germany and the USA. Fred Frith is credited as from the UK, which is true, but by this point he’d been based in the USA for over 10 years, and his 2 contributions were recorded at Noise NY studio by Kramer. The other USA artists are Henry Kaiser and John Zorn (with Blind Idiot God, the avant metal NY band that’s still going). These 3 musicians were among the best known in the avant music world when the CD was released in 1989, and they still are to this day. Is that why I bought the CD? I can’t remember, but I don’t think so. 1989 was also a time when, thanks in large part to those three, Japanese avant music was becoming very popular in the USA. Is that why I bought it? Maybe.
Of the 20 tracks, the majority of them are from Japanese musicians. Looking at the names of the bands and musicians today, I don’t recognize any of them. The players in the band Picky Picnic are the ones responsible for the release of this CD. That’s a catchy band name, but I’m quite certain I’ve never seen it anywhere else.
The songs by the bands from Japan are by far my favorites on the CD. Which isn’t to say that the other songs are weak, as one might expect from a compilation record. Every song here is a gem. A few are sheer genius. If I can make a sweeping generalization about the Japanese songs, for this is where the genius is found, it is that if you enjoy the music of the early Residents (band from San Francisco), then you will love this. All the weirdness that I mentioned above, and then didn’t hear on “The Girl From Ipanema”, can be found in spades on most of these tracks from Japan.
But, “The Girl From Ipanema” is also a track from Japan. Time for me to take a Drive to Heaven.
As I’d planned, later in the day I listened to the entire CD, more than once. On first listen I was flooded with old memories of discovering this music. On second listen I heard it for the first time with my now updated ears. The additional years of music listening since first acquiring this CD have made me appreciate and enjoy the CD even more.
If there is a theme to this compilation, it’s hard to pin down, even after reading the liner notes that have lost something in their translation from Japanese to English. Almost all the tracks are around 4 minutes or less, which for me is just long enough to want to hear more.
As I listen to each track one after the other, I feel like I’m going on a journey through a foreign musical landscape with occasional glimpses of familiar territory. By the time I get to “The Boy From Ipanema” on track 14, I’m a little lost, a bit disoriented, but happy to be there. The track DOES sound weirder now that I’ve been transported to this slightly alien musicscape. For me, this listening session has been a bit of time travel through my mind, no doubt enhanced by the obsession I returned with from the tourist zone.
I would love to recreate this listening session for you, however I could not find the entire CD anywhere that could be streamed. Score one for this CD. I’m slightly embarrassed to admit that I no longer have a way to rip a CD into my computer. Oddly enough, I am currently engaged in some projects that have me “ripping” my old cassette tapes into my computer, so go figure.
In order to get something to you right now, I scoured YouTube once again and created this playlist of 15 of the 20 songs. Enjoy …
Do you have a favorite version of this song? Please share it in the comments.
I've watched that video on The Girl from Ipanema a couple times. As I'd always thought bossa nova was too smooth for my taste, it was fascinating to see how harmonically unusual the tune is. Looking forward to listening to your playlist. I know Frith's work quite well, and I even remember Picky Picnic. They were on a cassette compilation called Local International, which was either released or distributed by Recommended (now ReR) run by Frith's old sparring partner, Chris Cutler. Somewhere I got mp3s of a Picky Picnic album entitled Ha Ha Tarachine but can't recall what it sounds like. Will have to hunt it up and give it a listen.
On your compilation (going by discogs listing) along with Frith, Kaiser, Zorn, I recognize Tipographica, Der Plan and Pyrolator. The over all tenor of the compilation reminds me of some of the releases by the French eccentrics who run InPolySons.
The Japanese underground has long fascinated me, beginning around the time Frith curated the Welcome to Dreamland compilation, and Cutler issued a compilation drawn from three releases by Wha Ha Ha. Dreamland included a track by the great female post punk band, Mizutama Shobodan (Polkadot Fire Brigade), as well as After Dinner, Saboten and others whose work I began to follow.
On second thought, since so many musicians have treated this song as a musical exercise in their own personal style without being too concerned by what the song was originally meant to be, it might have been interesting to hear what Sid Vicious could have done with it after what he did with "My Way", a French original by Claude François before Paul Anka wrote his English lyrics that were not necessarily in line with the meaning of the original song, but that became a worldwide hit by Frank Sinatra who also recorded his own version of the Girl from Ipanema.