The Waters of March
Just in time for actual March, we've gotten obsessed with this bilingual cover of the Brazilian song The Waters of March by Suzannah McCorkle:
We learned about this song because it, incredibly, plays over the end credits of Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie, which ends on an insanely whimsical, depressing, and sensitive note for which the song provides an incredible pairing. It feels like both a perfect fit and an outrageous kind of whiplash.
The original, Águas de Março, is in Portuguese and also of course just insanely good. The duet above is nuts. A solo cover by Art Garfunkel popularized it in English, using the original English lyrics written by the song's composer, Antônio Carlos Jobim, who handled his own translation. I think the McCorkle version, which contains very significant rewrites, is sometimes much more poetically phrased than the original English. It retains most (but definitely, definitely not all) of its sense. In turn, the original English contains some but definitely not all the Brazilian references in the original Portuguese. It was a lot of fun to sit down with Youtube and follow the maze of all these different versions back through history.
The Garfunkel version was used well, apparently, in the 2021 movie The Worst Person in the World, which I haven't yet seen! But this interview on NPR reveals that Johnson and McCarrol actually chose the McCorkle version for a deeper cut - it was used in the 2002 documentary Comedian. The stuff they have to say about the song and that documentary in that interview is great. I recommend listening!