Track of the Week #2: Rodrigo Amarante

Track of the Week #2: Rodrigo Amarante - 'Tardei'

Tuesday Jun 5th 2018

Every week, we’ll bring you a must-hear track from the Le Guess Who? 2018 line-up. This week, it's the Brazilian singer-songwriter who wrote the theme song for Netflix hit series 'Narcos'. But,...

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Every week, we’ll bring you a must-hear track from the Le Guess Who? 2018 line-up. This week, it's the Brazilian singer-songwriter who wrote the theme song for Netflix hit series 'Narcos'. But, like we wrote in his artist bio: just don't pin his work down on that little fact alone.

Rodrigo Amarante's 'Tardei' is a magical song, and the closing track of his 2014 debut solo album 'Cavalo'. The album was released after Amarante moved to Los Angeles and stripped back his arrangements. The results are noticeable on the tender, soft-spoken and warming 'Tardei'. Watch the video below, recorded in the mountains of northern Portugal. You can also find the song in our official 2018 playlist.

"[Tardei] is about a trip and the time that it took for it to end. It is sung in retrospective. First it says: 'It took me a long, long time but I arrived at last.' Then it says something about how for every goodbye there is a knot, a bead on a rosary that becomes a gift upon arrival, a token of love and of strength and patience. But as the song progresses it is suggested that this is not a retrospective account of an arrival but instead a projection of it, that is sung while the journey is still happening, an invented tool to pass the lonely and uncertain hours of that walk toward what is now revealed unknown." - Rodrigo Amarante

Rodrigo Amarante's performance at Le Guess Who? 2018 is curated by Devendra Banhart. This curated program also features a.o. Vashti Bunyan, Beverly Glenn-Copeland, Ebo Taylor, Jessica Pratt, SASAMI, Roger Eno, Shannon Lay, and more.