"This is a perfect record, It's heart on sleeve music, which is absolutely what I wanted to try to make on my album. Brazil is a very important place for me in terms of its music and culture; it's the first place I lived in where I felt I got pulled out of a bubble, and had to stand on my feet in a different culture to mine, and Jorge Ben is one of its greatest figures. He was so important in the bossa nova era, and a pivotal person in tropicalia – Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil looked up to him like a brother, as he was older. There's so much in that country's art that's about richness and magic, like the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, as well. In many parts of England, you have to pretend to down nine pints to get into that frame of mind. That's probably why other cultures appeal to me."

"Cartola is a salty, classic samba character from Rio who I don’t think a lot of people outside of Brazil really know about. I only found out about him through someone I know who married a Brazilian woman and he got super-deep into Samba and its history. “Brazilian music has always been a part of what Grizzly Bear do, especially Tropicalia records, Marcos Valle and Gilberto Gil. All of that stuff has been part of our vocabulary since our early years and in the last couple of years after Shields, I started discovering and getting into straight-up Samba. It isn’t trying to be psychedelic, blast anything open or trying to be crazy, it hits you right in the heart and does exactly what it’s supposed to do. “It’s not trying to blow your mind or anything, it’s just doing what people do in a Samba and it communicates so much. I know a little Portuguese, I don’t speak it well enough to know exactly what he’s saying but you can still feel the vibe and emotion of the song without knowing the words. There’s something so great about music that’s so straight-up in its own vernacular, that’s is exactly what this is and it’s just killing it. “‘Preciso Me Encontrar’ is my favourite track on the record and it’s such a good example of what that music does so well, it’s really honest, as honest as you could possibly be, there’s absolutely zero pretention going on and it’s played beautifully."

"There was a record store in the Times Square subway station, and another one on 42nd Street, both of which had big “international sections,” as they called it. It included everything from the rest of the world, all on vinyl, but with no information. You’d look at the cover and go, What’s this like? It was a total crapshoot. But occasionally, I’d hear something that would blow my mind, like a Fela Kuti record; the first one I picked up was called Expensive Shit, and obviously I picked that up because of the title. The covers were the best—like Cambodian pop records with a bunch of people in traditional garb, all holding electric guitars—and you’d look at them for clues. You’d think, What in the world could that be? You’d buy it, and it would be pretty cool. In 1986, I did a fiction film called True Stories. I guess you would call it a musical comedy. We were doing the mixing in San Francisco, so I’d go down to the big Tower Records on North Beach and go to the international section. One day, I came back with a whole bunch of Brazilian records, because I had maybe heard of a couple of the artists, but didn’t really know what their records were like. One was a Caetano Veloso record called Muito, and then there was a Milton Nascimento record, and probably a Gilberto Gil record, and those blew my mind. They had elements that were psychedelic and that had a Brazilian feel. They were really beautiful, but then I dug a little bit more and found out they were also really political. These guys had been exiled, thrown in jail. I was connecting with it, and I realized that my generation didn’t know any of this music. So I asked our record label, “Can we license this music, and can I make a compilation of my favorite cuts?” That one record led to another one: There was a Brazilian series, then a Cuban series, because Cuban music had not been available in the United States for decades. And I started my own label, Luaka Bop."