Close to Home/ Quem é Você - Lyle Mays & Luiz Avellar

Zizi Possi (edited to add: she has a blog! that's so cool! And her name is pronounced "Zeezee" with the strongest syllable being the 2nd zee), who is mostly an interpreter, not a songwriter, is one of my favorite Brazilian singers, so I decided to begin with the song from her repertoire that moves me the most. As luck would have it, it's a good song to quick start my music sharing posts because it's actually composed by an American keyboardist and composer, Lyle Mays, who used to play with the Pat Metheny Group. I had to go hear samples of Mays's music in the Amazon website to figure out the title of the song in English (Close to Home - it's the last one in the CD linked to above, my heart fluttered when I realized I had found the song).

In Portuguese it is titled Quem é você (Who are you[?]/ who you are) and what moves me the most about this song is that it completely describes how I felt during most of my teenage years, right up until the day I met K, who was the "you" Luiz Avellar's lyrics are talking about.

Here are the words in Portuguese followed by my English translation:

Quem é você
Por que te vejo sem te ver
Quem é você
Sabe você,
Por que te sinto sem te ver
Quem é você
Por que te espero sem saber
Quem é você
Quem sabe lá,
No fim do coração
Você é só prá mim a solidão
Quando eu te ver,
Não sei se vou me conhecer
O que vai ser
Será por mim, por ti,
Porque decerto nem sei mais,
Por onde anda a minha paz
Quem é você
Por que te amo sem querer,
Alguém por mim,
Me faça enfim te conhecer
Pra eu ser feliz.

Who are you?
Why do I see you without seeing you
Who are you?
You know… you,
Why do I feel you without seeing you?
Who are you?
Why do I wait for you without knowing
Who you are
Maybe there -
At end of the heart
You are only loneliness for me
When I see you
I don’t know if I will recognize myself
What’s going to be
Will be for me, for you
Because perhaps I don’t even know anymore
Where my my peace is
Who are you?
Why do I love you without wanting it
Someone [please]
Make me get to know/meet you at last
So I can be happy.

Here's a video of Zizi singing the song. It brings me to tears, every time, because it makes me think of how much I "lived" the feelings it describes during my teenage years:

And here's a very long (9+ min.) clip of Lyle Mays and the Pat Metheny Group playing it in 1982 (I was 11!) at the Montreal Jazz Festival:


The last words of the song, "So I can be happy" link this song to the next two that I am going to share, and relate it to my obsession with the concept of happiness and joy that permeated my adolescent years.