According to Wikipedia...
"Garota de Ipanema" ("The Girl from Ipanema") is a well-known bossa nova song, a worldwide hit in the mid-1960s that won a Grammy for Record of the Year in 1965. It was written in 1962, with music by Antônio Carlos Jobim and Portuguese lyrics by Vinicius de Moraes. English lyrics were written later by Norman Gimbel.[1]
The first commercial recording was in 1962, by Pery Ribeiro. The version performed by Astrud Gilberto, along with João Gilberto and Stan Getz, from the 1964 album Getz/Gilberto, became an international hit, reaching number five in the United States pop chart, number 29 in the United Kingdom, and charting highly throughout the world. Numerous recordings have been used in films, sometimes as an elevator music cliché (for example, near the end of The Blues Brothers). It is believed to be the second-most recorded pop song in history, after Yesterday by The Beatles.[2] In 2004, it was one of 50 recordings chosen that year by the Library of Congress to be added to the National Recording Registry.
Continuing from Wikipedia...
The song was inspired by Heloísa Eneida Menezes Paes Pinto (now Helô Pinheiro), a nineteen-year-old girl living on Montenegro Street in the fashionable Ipanema district in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.[5] Daily, she would stroll past the popular Veloso bar-café, not just to the beach ("each day when she walks to the sea"), but in the everyday course of her life. She would sometimes enter the bar to buy cigarettes for her mother and leave to the sound of wolf-whistles.[6] In the winter of 1962, the composers watched the girl pass by the bar, and it is easy to imagine why they noticed her—Helô was a 173-cm (five-foot eight-inch) brunette, and she attracted the attention of many of the bar patrons.
When I hear this song I sometimes think of Second Life. Each of us girls lock ourselves into our ageless avatars of perfect skin and shapes. We are "The Girl from Ipanema" every day we login.
