A Pipoca Grande

sagesuede | March 4, 2017

This is about a relationship I had where we ate a lot of Chicago style popcorn.

If you aren’t familiar with that flavor, it’s kind of like kettle corn with caramel and cheese mixed onto the popcorn. In that relationship, we liked to curl up on the couch and watch TV, while eating popcorn. I had a really good time and this song is reminiscing about that experience. Get yourself a large popcorn and give it a listen! Lol

This is Still a Very Experimental Track

The lyrics are meant to be a little weird and interesting. I realize the bass makes it sound sort of eerie, but that is because there are 3 levels of the bass to make it a deeper sound that is more immersive. At first I only talk about popcorn and then it gets more romantic. I miss those days… I had fun writing this song and I think that it has some interesting sounds. I am always trying to break boundaries and create something bigger than myself, so I hope you can appreciate where I’m coming from.

I LOVE FUNK BRASILEIRO

I still listen to a lot of funk (pronounced funky) that my friends in Brazil send to me. I tried to use the common beat that they use in Brazilian funk within this song, because I love this music. I listen to Brazilian funk on a regular basis because the drums are so much better than American popular music (when they divert from the simple beat). They also take more risks with the electronic sampling and that is similar to the type of music I make, because I also take many risks in electronic samples. I would love to collaborate with funkeiros in the future and I have a lot of respect for this fun genre of music!

Why Are You More Fluent in Portuguese Than Other Languages?

I mentioned this in one other post, but my mom was one of the volunteer Spanish teachers in my elementary school. I learned Portuguese very quickly, because I was exposed to a similar language at a young age. It didn’t take me much effort to get used to the accent and language of Portuguese. At this point, Portuguese has exceeded all of the other languages I speak and it is the language in which I am most fluent, after English. I usually switch to Portuguese whenever I don’t know something in Spanish.

I Also Have a Lot of Brazilian Friends.

When I was in this relationship, I spent a lot of time with Brazilians in Framingham, MA. That part of Massachusetts has a lot of Brazilian residents and even some wonderful little shops that sell authentic churrasco and açai. I love Brazilian culture and I also visited Brazil once for a month. I still have plenty of friends in Belo Horizonte and a few others across the country, such as my ex, a former roommate and a few classmates from college. Someday I will visit Brazil again! I had an amazing time and people were so warm and inviting. I even got invited to a Birthday party during the first week I was there.

The Struggles of Being a Polyglot

When I think about Brazil or a foreign language I speak, sometimes my accent changes. This is normal and I am not trying to be someone else. I also might adapt the way I act in turn, because different parts of the world have a different way of acting (that’s what culture is) and this often exists within the grammatical structure of languages. For instance, in most of Russian culture smiling is off-putting because it is like a horse bearing its teeth. This is a tradition from the soviet union, so nowadays you see a lot more smiling in Russian popular culture and they are strongly influenced by American media.

Honestly, I even have a tendency to change the way I act a little bit within the U.S.A.. I learned to be more aggressive in Boston and you also have to talk much faster than Texans are used to. If a Southerner doesn’t adapt to the speed, then no one will listen to them until the end of a sentence. You adapt to where you are and what you are doing, so it’s normal for my accent to change a bit when I am discussing another language or associate culture. I hope that makes sense; I just kind of anticipate some haters coming after me in the future and think it’s better to explain this reality in advance.