The Girl from Ipanema

Last week I got a song stuck in my head, and it still hasn't gone out.  You might know it: 'The Girl from Ipanema'...  A world-famous tune, often used as elevator-music, as background during phone-call transfers, as 'muzak' in shopping centers...

It happened when I drove to Paris very early on Monday to go to Les Blogs 2.0.  Somewhere on the empty highway the song came out of my radio, but I paid little attention to it.  However, much later that day, during a party in Paris, I heard it again.  And about an hour later again (the bar's playlist must have resumed from start).

Result: the melody got stuck in my head, including saxophone track, variations and all.  For some reason the sax reminds me of street artists in subways trying to make a buck by playing this ditty all day long.

I never really listened to the lyrics of the song before.  I had a vague notion of a beautiful Mexican girl from a town called Ipanema walking to the sea and the singer watching her go by or something.

But after having the song in my head for a few days I decided to look up the lyrics and try to find some of the history behind the song.  And what do you know?  The invaluable WikiPedia had an entire article devoted to the song!

Seems like the girl from Ipanema really existed, only that she was from Brazil.  Ipanema turns out to be a fashionable district from Rio De Janeiro.  The girl in question, a Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto, used to pass by a certain bar each day on her way to go suntanning at the beach.  The authors of the song used to hang out at the bar and watched her go by, and this formed the inspiration for the now world-famous song.

You learn something new and useless every day on this interwebnet thingy!