The Girl From Ipanema By The Boys From Maine

My two sons, AKA Unorganized Hancock, are back with fresh material. It’s bossa.

Bossa is one of those words that doesn’t translate well. It’s Portuguese, via Brazil, and means something’s done with panache, or in a stylish, effortless way. The hippie word “cool” isn’t a bad approximate. If you look up Bossa Nova, it’s generally translated as “new wave,” but that hardly does justice to the expression.

Bossa Nova was definitely a new, cool thing right around the Eisenhower/Kennedy divide. Back when I still played music, we referred to this song, cheekishly, as “The Girl From Iwo Jima.” I had a whole set of bent lyrics for it that I could place right here and ruin the song for you forevermore, but I won’t. No matter how trite the song got to be, you always new it was trite because it was wonderful and universal. It still matters. It might be the second-most popular song recorded in my lifetime.

Well, after Unorganized Hancock performed it, it became the first-most popular song at our house. Hope it is at your house, too.