Dreaming of the Sea: Madredeus & Banda Cósmica with "Não Estamo Sós"

I grew up in a small town on the Northern California coast...a small town filled with Portuguese families that made a living through fishing. In that way, our harbor back in the early days of the town must have seemed like a harbor on the Portuguese coast, with the sounds of the Portuguese language waxing and waning as the fishing boats made ready and left port in the morning, and returned and were moored in the evening. I grew up with the smell of the sea in my nostrils, the wet sea air in my hair, and the sound of the roaring surf in my ears at all times of the day. I went to sleep with the low moaning of buoys, their sound carried by winds for miles, on windy evenings. Two of my uncles were fishermen (though they weren't Portuguese) but they fished alongside men with names like Figueredo, Tomás and Pacheco. My father (adoptive father) was also part Portuguese - his mother was a Pacheco and my father had dark skin like someone whose lineage may have originated in the Azores.

Having grown up near the ocean, I am very empathetic with the Portuguese love for the sea, and have come to appreciate that their songs often extoll the sea or express a deep longing for it. As a coastal boy who has now lived over half his life away from the sea, and who ironically now lives about as far environmentally from the sea as he possibly could in a high desert environment, I still dream of the ocean, its sounds, smells and taste. When I go back home to see my mother, my body almost automatically adjusts to the damp air, drinking in the wetness in the atmosphere. My love for fog and the other variations of coastal weather returns. If I were a musician, I think I too (and I recently found out that I may actually have some Portuguese in me) would write songs about the sea expressing my love for her in no uncertain terms.

Não Estamo Sós (I believe it translates as "We are not alone") is by Portuguese band Madredeus & Banda Cósmica. Madredeus combines traditional Portuguese music with contemporary folk, creating melancholy songs that often, like fado, refer to the sea, travelling or absence. This may sound like fado, but fado is a subgenre of the type of traditional music of Portugal that Madredeus draws from. The band was largely unknown for a long while outside of Portugal, but became internationally known when filmmaker Wim Wenders asked them to perform for the soundtrack of his movie Lisbon Story and the soundtrack received rave reviews. Banda Cósmica is a portion of Madredeus that brings in new instrumentation, such as African instruments and percussion. They have released nineteen albums to date. Não Estamo Sós is from their 2009 album A Nova Aurora.