Love in wartime with Luísa Sobral dancing in an ode to life | Music

The “S” of dancing it could come from Sobral, but it comes from Sophia. Or rather, from a sentence that Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen wrote, one day, when refusing the 1990 Orthographic Agreement in ten points: “The only Portuguese word whose spelling needs to be changed is dance, which must be written with ‘s’ as it was before, because the ‘ç’ is a seated letter”. Luísa Sobral liked the idea and changed the title of her latest album, highlighting the capitalized “S” in the middle of the word dancing. Because it’s a dance record, not a dance record, since in it words and sounds seem packaged in this impetus to embody a feeling of happiness, where in a well-tempered pop lightness, love mixes (“I want to talk about love/ Nothing of new I know”) and disaffection (“There is war on television/ The old and the young with guns in their hands”), as, by the way, he always did. “My records all talk about loves and dislikes”, says Luísa to Ípsilon. “Because I don’t think there are any more issues, really. Even when we talk about war, we are talking about love, in this case Putin’s self-love. There are different ways of looking at it, but really it’s all about love.”