Tuca ‎– Drácula I Love You LP

CAT: TUCA1974

One of the rarest masterpieces of brasilian music: Recorded 1974 in France (!) and never ever rereleased. This reissue comes with the original planned cover (with a wonderful painting of Jeannette Prioli) in a gatefold sleeve and extensive linernotes with the history of the Tuca and her music.

You find strange and melancholic música popular brasileira juxtaposed with orchestral drama, french chanson, classic film music, soul, a sort of aggressive samba. Created by Tuca, one of the most enigmatic figure in the rich canon of Brazil's popular music.

Tuca was the coproducer, arranger, and guitarist of Nara Leão’s bossa nova milestone Dez anos depois (1971) and La Question (also 1971) by Françoise Hardy. Her own Drácula I love you was recorded at the legendary Château D’Hérouville studios outside of Paris, where artists such as Pink Floyd, Canned Heat, Elton John, and David Bowie recorded in the 1970s.

The album brings together eleven unique pieces, including one sung in French as well as an instrumental track, which shows the particular degree to which Tuca always treated her voice as an instrument on equal footing with others. The cover was based on a painting of a woman in art nouveau style by the Brazilian artist Jeannette Priolli, who was also a coauthor of four pieces on the album.

But the album failed. A lesbian woman who was significantly overweight and on top of that a real diva - as we know from Nara Leão’s accounts and the smattering of video clips that have survived - with a tremendous stage presence, loud, brash, a force of nature—this woman as the embodiment of horror for a heteronormative and patriarchal oppressive society could not have failed to attract the scrutiny of censors.

In May 1978, she died at the age of 33 as a result of a macrobiotic diet, or to put it more plainly: she starved to death.

Tracklist