The Year in Music: 17th March

Águas De Março, Antônio Carlos Jobim (1972)

Olive green
White noise
Warring water
Khaki clashes
Moss mounds in the torrents
Hibernating supernatural creatures
Shaken, woken
Their thirst overwhelmed
Brown leaves on the bank still turning to mud to mulch to silt
And me among them.

In Brazil, March is the year’s rainiest month. So it seems in Llanystumdwy, a village on the Lleyn Peninsula, high above Cardigan Bay, although the bay itself is invisible, somewhere beyond the constant drench, hiding at the end of the river Dwyfor, within the white, solid sea-sky.

In Brazil, Spring is not coming now. Summer is ending. Antonio Carlos Jobim wrote this song – one of his most beloved songs – in March 1972, when he was staying at a rancho in the country's interior, frustrated by the mud and the constant stormy weather. It became a song of cascading images, about how nature carries metaphors in every object, every detail, every texture, how a mind can whirl quickly from the ordinary to the existential:

A stick, a stone, it's the end of the road
It's the rest of a stump, it's a little alone
It's a sliver of glass, it is life, it's the sun
It is night, it is death, it's a trap, it's a gun…