Fool on the Hill

The Beatles wrote "Fool on the Hill" as a meditation on visionary solitude — the person everyone dismisses who nonetheless sees the world clearly. Sergio Mendes and Brasil 66 extract something different from it: the bossa nova treatment, with gentle percussion, guitar patterns that breathe and settle, and Lani Hall's voice floating above it all with characteristic cool warmth, transforms the song's isolation into something more peaceful than painful. What McCartney intended as melancholy, Mendes renders as contemplative. The arrangement does not fight the original melody's plaintive quality but enfolds it in a rhythmic comfort that the Beatles' version lacks. This is the creative act that Mendes performed repeatedly in this period: taking American and British compositions and revealing what they contained that was compatible with Brazilian sonic sensibility, which turned out to be quite a lot. The harmonics are preserved, the emotional core honored, but the relationship to time — the way the song inhabits its own duration — is completely transformed. Best heard not as a Beatles cover but as a demonstration of how the same notes carry completely different emotional valences depending on how they are rhythmically organized.