Song You Need: Let this Brazilian breakup track ease your fresh wounds

“Canção da Cura” is the second single from Sessa’s sophomore album, Estrela Acesa, out June 24 via Mexican Summer.

May 11, 2022
Song You Need: Let this Brazilian breakup track ease your fresh wounds Photo by Helena Wolfensen.  

Few breakup songs sound as serene as Sessa's “Canção da Cura” ("Song of Healing"), the second single from the São Paolo singer-songwriter's sophomore LP. Premiering with The FADER today in advance of the record's June 24 release via Mexican Summer, the song is a sonic and spiritual companion to the project's lead offering, March's "Gostar do Mundo." Where the earlier track tarried in the fields of new love, the new song surveys the junkyard of a relationship's aftermath but with a gentle enough eye to find scraps worth salvaging.

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Over tastefully tapped percussion, a delicately plucked bass, and guitar strums quiet enough to let the sounds of strings sliding under fingers escape through their cracks, Sessa sings in a tuneful tenor barely above a whisper, a backing vocalist joining him an octave above. The song's lyrics are a series of simple refrains, repeated like mantras: "To the sound of drums / I'll consume you," "Happy in excess / Or ruined in pain."

“This is a breakup song, a song about the impossibility of love," Sessa excess, "framed in the context of an invented ritual for healing the bruised bodies of lovers ‘spoiled by the whims of love,’ as Carlos Drummond de Andrade, one of the most important Brazilian poets, would put it. On an exploded meaning level, it also captures some of the main themes in the album: songs of healing, making music, combining sounds as a way to make sense of emotions, of being alive.”

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Watch Gabriel Rolim's multi-media video for “Canção da Cura” below.

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Song You Need: Let this Brazilian breakup track ease your fresh wounds