Photo by Ben Palhov
You asked me to dive in my turbulent soul and bring you back ten treasures.
Well... It has been a long road and more than half of a century...
My musical conscience start very faraway from the point I'm right now...
Growing up in the 60s and 70s in Brazil, a country under a military dictatorship,
was very difficult to have access to New Music, it was taken as subversive culture...
Everything started for me when I saw for the first time Elvis Presley singing in the movies.
All those beautiful girls falling in Love...
I just knew it! I wanted to be like that.
You asked me to dive in my turbulent soul and bring you back ten treasures.
Well... It has been a long road and more than half of a century...
My musical conscience start very faraway from the point I'm right now...
Growing up in the 60s and 70s in Brazil, a country under a military dictatorship,
was very difficult to have access to New Music, it was taken as subversive culture...
Everything started for me when I saw for the first time Elvis Presley singing in the movies.
All those beautiful girls falling in Love...
I just knew it! I wanted to be like that.
1. Elvis Presley | Kiss Me Quick
This is the first song I learn to sing and play on the guitar, as a 12-year-old boy. It says all I wanted to say to a girl. The rush feeling of the first kisses are unforgettable.
2. Caetano Veloso | Chuva, Suor E Cerveja (Rain, Sweat And Beer)
I remember still the first tape player/recorder that we had. And with it: two tapes cassettes. One with this song - the first Brazilian song I could hear and repeat again and again until I learned the lyrics so well that it made me understand that I can write in my own language my own words.
3. Led Zeppelin | Kashmir
This is the song that drove me to build my first electric guitar. I spent hours in front of the music instruments store window. Looking to the expensive guitars, dreaming to have the money to buy one. I managed the get enough to buy an amplifier, a pickup and steel strings that I used to transform my classic guitar in an electric guitar.
4. The Clash | London Calling
With Brazil back to Democracy, the first new and young Music started coming and The Clash was there to give us a boost of Creativity and a strong wish to play a lot of bands started just after the listening of the album London Calling.
5. Joy Division | Love Will Tear Us Apart
My broken soul could finally find some others similar or even more tormented souls and Ian Curtis really catched me with his sensibility and sadness... I never heard anyone to express it so well.
6. Dead Can Dance | Enigma Of The Absolute
Why I have this karma with The Dark and Mysterious Side of Life? Maybe all humans have their dark and twisted side, that we try to heal or just survive it... This Music helps me to experience emotionally something that is very hard and painful to share in any other way.
7. Chico Buarque De Hollanda | Retrato Em Branco E Preto (with Antônio Carlos Jobim)
This song and its lyrics is a map of the Lonely Soul. It explains in a simple and genius way why there is all The Suffering of The Broken Hearth.
8. Francisco Alves & Castro Barbosa | Feitio De Oração
This is some of the best lyrics written in Portuguese of all times. Noel Rosa is the genius behind the Brazilian Music lyrics. I cannot sleep in peace if I don't include this song in my list.
9. Beck | Everybody's Got To Learn Sometime (The Korgis Cover) (Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Everything falls in place in this song... In a time when I lost Hope in Humanity... When I thought that nothing more could be done to move my fossil self... This song saved me and comforted me, giving just enough air to breathe and survive another day.
10. Daft Punk | Technologic
I was lost, The World just moved on... I felt like an old vintage instrument living in a desert alone and waiting to die... The Digital Inside The Box era have started and I'm a part of The Past. Daft Punk showed me The Light at the end of the tunnel. While listening to this song I started rebuilding my studio and a new horizon appeared. I was now able, from my isolated little island, to compose, record, produce and release my Music. That was a big revolution and a new beginning.
