The first one would probably be San Francisco Bay blues, which is an old song by a guy named Jesse Fuller from San Francisco, California. It’s become a staple in blues, but it’s one of those songs where someone leaves someone else and then they’re like, feeling sad, that type of thing, but it can be a really upbeat good song.

The other one is a song called Kuro’s Samba, which is a song that probably only I would know here. It’s by a guy named Kyozo Nishioka, and he was one of the subjects in my research on Bossa Nova and samba in Japan. His story and the love for his wife was one of the most true things, I’ve never seen anything like it. He and his wife, Kuro, traveled across South America with little to no money and they wrote songs together. He wrote one called Kuro’s Samba. It’s one of my favorites and it’s just a pure song about someone you love. I think what makes it more impactful is that his wife passed away of cancer in 1997 and then he, from that trauma, took his own life in 1999 so there was a very poetic context around it.

One more love song. Okay, how about one I heard recently. I’m into Bossa Nova. One of the main people that I listen to, his name’s João Gilberto, and he created the concept and basically the genre of Bossa Nova. Almost all of his songs are about love, but there’s one I’ve heard recently called Izaura, which he performed with a lady. I don’t know who it is, because they don’t list it in the song, but he performs it with her, and it’s sort of a dialog between two lovers. He’s lamenting about how he must go to work but he doesn’t want to leave her.