The Private Canon: Um paisagem inocência

This post is part of a series.

Milton Nascimento's stunning 1988 album Miltons was among the LPs that crossed my desk at the USC Daily Trojan, and it probably deserves a full formative-album replay consideration—there's not a bad track on it, from its spectral version of "La Bamba" to a series of brisk collaborations with Herbie Hancock (this is my favorite of the bunch).

But there is still nothing like its mesmeric opener, the curiously titled "River Phoenix (Carta a um jovem ator)," a deceptively simple guitar-and-voice conjuring that manages to feel almost free tempo despite its steady pulse. It's the Brazilian singer/songwriter's tribute to the young actor he happened to see in The Mosquito Coast while staying in a New York hotel in the midst of a tour, a transfixing experience he later described thus: "River’s eyes were like catalysts of an original feeling, something ravishing, to which no one had yet given a name.” The lyrics read like a very typical, slightly stalker-ish fan letter (apologies for the rough Google translation):

If one day we meet
And I confess
I've seen a movie so many times
To unveil your eyes
And if we talk
Tell the things you lived
What we expect from tomorrow
Can it happen?
Yeah, parallel to the character
I really wanted to know about you
I wish you were happy

Nascimento then riffs on River's unconventional name, invoking a "landscape of innocence but what is known and what leads." That last bit of Google translation is frustratingly opaque, especially as that moment in the song sounds a lot like its emotional high point, leading to an aching appoggiatura on the lines "Mas que se sabe e que conduz" (around 1:40 in the video above). The conclusion backs away a bit, almost apologetically, from this overblown analogy:

Lead this moment now
The thought and my eyes
Shining with emotion and grateful
Someone who only knew you
In a film you have seen so many times
This poem happened

Trying to piece together the grammar, I wonder if the "landscape" line leading into this conclusion is essentially saying: Like a river, the space you've opened up in me has led me to this gesture of gratitude. (Portuguese speakers, weigh in!)

But if I have some confusion about the lyrics, there is no mistaking the feeling conveyed by the music. Like its namesake it flows, with Nascimento's gorgeous, inimitable falsetto-meets-baritone voice bobbing freely but hardly indifferently across its surface. Apart from guitar and voice, there is what might be a hint of a cuíca or a flute, a few skitters of percussion, and slightly eerie whispers of spoken word I can't place. The conclusion fades on a mournful falling-and-rising progression and seems to briefly introduce a child's voice—all elements that may, along with the song's content, arguably edge into creepy territory, though it is hard to shake a more mournful interpretation that has accrued in retrospect. Phoenix—who became friends with Nascimento—would die just five years later, at the tender age of 23 (which in turn inspired another favorite song of mine, Rufus Wainwright's "Matinee Idol"). Movingly, Nascimento later paid tribute to his unlikely friend with a cover of "Ol' Man River," another song in which the titular body of water evokes a landscape, though hardly one of innocence.