Nonesuch Records releases Caetano Veloso’s album Abraçaço in North America on March 25, 2014. The album, which was released in 2012 in South America and Europe, won a Latin Grammy for Best Singer-Songwriter Album and earned the #1 spot on Rolling Stone Brazil’s Best National Albums of 2012 list. Produced by Pedro Sá and Caetano Veloso’s son Moreno Veloso, Abraçaço is the final installment of a trilogy with the youthful trio he employed on 2007’s Cê and 2009’s zii e zie known as the Banda Cê: Pedro Sá on electric guitar, Ricardo Dias Gomes on bass and Rhodes piano, and Marcelo Callado on drums. “We are people of different generations sharing similar musical and human interests,” Veloso says. A fusion of the traditional Tropicália style and the indie pop of contemporary Rio, Abraçaço includes 11 original songs written by Veloso. 

The title of the record, Abraçaço, meaning “big hug,” is an expression the singer uses to sign off on emails and is employed here to mark the end of the critically acclaimed musical trilogy. David Byrne said of Cê in Artforum, “Veloso has found a sparse, post-rock beauty in which strange yet simple rock instrumentation is juxtaposed with softly seething vocals.” Of zii e zie, the Times (UK) says, “The Brazilian master remains in a league of his own. Forty years after injecting a rock beat into Brazilian pop (and earning the disapproval of the country’s military rulers in the process), Veloso has returned to similar territory ... fans won’t be disappointed.”

Caetano Veloso is among the most influential and beloved artists to emerge from Brazil, where he began his musical career in the 1960s. He has over 50 recordings to his credit, including 14 on Nonesuch. Absorbing musical and aesthetic ideas from sources as diverse as The Beatles, concrete poetry, the French Dadaists, and the Brazilian modernist poets of the 1920s, Veloso—together with Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, his sister Maria Bethânia, and a number of other poets and intellectuals—founded the Tropicália movement and permanently altered the course of his country’s popular music.

The free, full-album MP3 downloads, available with other discs in the Nonesuch Store, are not included with this CD.