MARISA MONTE Announces Major U.S. Tour March 4-27 + New Album 'PORTAS"

Singer-songwriter MARISA MONTE, one of Brazil’s most adventurous and internationally acclaimed stars for over thirty years, is returning to the stage with a vengeance. Monte will resume touring in January 2022; in March she launches a ten-city U.S. tour—the largest of her career thus far. Her new show is based on her twelfth album, Portas (Doors), released in July on her own label Phonomotor and distributed by Sony Music; to date it has amassed well over thirty million streaming plays.

Monte’s voice has the lilt and delicacy of bossa nova, but her singing, like her songwriting, is driven by a fierce intelligence, a curiosity about the human condition, and a passion for risks. She has collaborated with a wide array of vanguard artists, including Seu Jorge, David Byrne, Philip Glass, Caetano Veloso, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Arto Lindsay, John Zorn, and Laurie Anderson. Recently Sony Music also released the single “Vento Sardo” (Sardinian Wind), written and sung by Monte and Jorge Drexler, the Oscar-winning Uruguayan singer-songwriter. They composed the song while riding together on a sailboat in Sardinia. Sung in Spanish and Portuguese, it talks about “the flow of life,” Monte says, “and how things are always in a dynamic movement, changing all the time.”

On October 22, Monte was in Sanremo, Italy to collect the prestigious Tenco Award for lifetime achievement in songwriting. Past recipients include Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Tom Waits, and several icons of Brazil (Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, and Vinicius de Moraes); Monte is her country’s first female honoree. “I’m glad to represent all my Brazilian sisters,” she says, “and to be opening doors for them outside Brazil. Female singers before my generation didn’t compose as much as now; it’s an interesting change in the way women occupy space on the musical scenery in Brazil, and it reflects our presence in society as well.”

Her newest album sprang out of the seemingly barren confinement imposed by the pandemic. While staying at home in Rio with her husband, son, and daughter, Monte planned Portas, an album filled with soft, comforting sounds and messages of hope. “I wanted to offer something that could heal and help people to cross this moment, to not be that depressed and sad,” she says. Of the sensual title track, Monte explains: “Doors are very symbolic elements; they talk about opportunities, changes, transformations, so I wanted to offer a sense of passage.”

In November 2020, when COVID restrictions began to ease, she started recording with her musicians in the studio, using full safety precautions. Musicians from New York, Spain, and Portugal made guest contributions through Zoom. Videos were shot for all the songs—“small musical documentaries that show the process of recording,” says Monte, “but also the garden, the sea, the sky, everything that was outside during the confinement, when we all had very limited physical space in which to live.”

MARISA MONTE “Portas” U.S. Tour 2022 

Mar 4 - Ft. Lauderdale, FL, Broward Center for the Performing Arts

Mar 6 - Atlanta, GA ,The Buckhead Theatre

Mar 10 - N. Bethesda, MD, Strathmore

Mar 12 - Minneapolis, MN, State Theatre

Mar 15 - Chicago, IL, The Vic

Mar 17 - Stamford, CT, The Palace Theatre

Mar 19 - Boston, MA,  Berklee Performance Center

Mar 22 - New York, NY, The Town Hall          

Mar 25 -  Berkeley, CA, The UC Theatre

Mar 27 - Los Angeles, CA ,Royce Hall