Nine Out of Ten

Recorded in London during his political exile from Brazil in the early 1970s, "Nine Out of Ten" belongs to the period when Caetano was absorbing the British folk-rock scene and filtering it through his Bahian sensibility without quite resolving the two into one thing. The song is stripped to essentials — guitar, voice, minimal accompaniment — with a directness that feels almost jarring from an artist associated with Tropicália's maximalism. He sings in English, and the lyrics carry the particular floating quality of second-language composition, beautiful slightly strange phrases that a native speaker would never have reached, imagery loosened from strict idiomatic logic into something more open. The emotional register is searching and tender, a man in voluntary exile meditating on love and distance and the landscape of a country he cannot return to. It sounds like a letter written at great length and then folded small, intimate in the way only music made far from home can be.