Where the music came from

A grandmother at the piano, a violão from the flea market

His grandmother on his father's side played piano and had one recurring sermon for his mother: look, these boys have to learn an instrument. Nobody in that house treated music as a hobby; it was a matter of inheritance, something to be passed on like a name.

His father, meanwhile, lived going to the Feira de Acari, coming home with trinkets of every kind. One day the trinket was a violão. He would gather the kids around it and almost, almost pull chords of Roberto Carlos songs out of the strings, and those almosts were the first music lessons. The grandmother who raised him sang every single afternoon: louvores from the sertão do Ceará, songs of the backlands carried into the suburbs of Rio. And his mother cleaned the house dancing, Sandra and Roberto Carlos on the turntable, housework performed as if it were a show.

Music did not arrive in that family. It was always there, in three generations at once: at the piano, at the flea market, at the mop.

Sultans of Swing, Bee Gees and the first chords

His brother Lauro was the door. He showed him the first movements on the violão and on the keyboard, hand over hand, the way these things are actually transmitted. It was at their uncle Zé's house that Lauro played him Sultans of Swing for the first time, and uncle Zé himself who put Telegraph Road on soon after, the two tracks that opened the road to Dire Straits, The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Rush, JJ Cale and Peter Gabriel, the whole canon entering the house one record at a time.

His uncle Paulo lived in France for years and was a composer with several recorded tracks and radio performances, proof from up close that the composer's life was a real thing a family member could live. His uncle Ramon kept the Bee Gees spinning. The family passed records around the way other families pass photos.

And the singing came from both shores of the ocean. On voice, Sting and Michael Bolton. From Brazil, Legião Urbana, Barão Vermelho, Djavan, Tim Maia and Roupa Nova, the national songbook played side by side with the rock imports.

Guitar, drums and Michael de Paula

At twelve he picked up the violão for good. His father bought an electric guitar and a drum kit, the drums shared with his friend Alexandre, an arrangement that said everything about how music was lived in that circle: in pairs, in turns, together.

Then, in school, came Michael de Paula. They formed a band, Rodrigo on keyboards and guitar, and Michael, more experienced, taught him how songs are actually built. He played the Salesianos school in Rocha Miranda many times and started writing instrumentals, his first originals, composed before he had ever sung a verse.

Two tape recorders and a stack of reel-to-reels

The first recordings came from a setup as simple as it was ingenious: two cassette recorders, bouncing tracks from one to the other, layer after layer, until a song existed. That is where recording stopped being magic and became craft.

His father fed the obsession, buying old reel-to-reel recorders and bringing them home. On those machines Rodrigo taught himself sound engineering, trial by error, and that autodidact school later paid for itself: Regra Zero ended up recorded and mixed by the musician himself.

Fest Valda, Morro da Urca, Circo Voador

In 1998 he entered the Fest Valda with a recorded cover of Sultans of Swing, a full-circle moment: the song his brother had shown him years earlier, now taken to a stage. He played the festival several times, in places like the Morro da Urca and the Circo Voador, and the instrumentals kept coming.

Vila Isabel, two Rodrigos and one test

After moving from Rocha Miranda, he met Rodrigo Garcia and Rodrigo Cosenza in Vila Isabel in 1998. They ordered a song from him, as a test. He came back with Perguntas Idiotas Para Você with Cozensa's lyrics, and the test was passed. Two years of shows followed, during which Cosenza introduced Rodrigo to the poet.

With Garcia and Cozenza he recorded As Melhores Coisas da Vida, shaped by the LogX sound, thinking that was where it ended. It was not.

Regra Zero, Canecão and Do Brasil

Then came the idea of his own band. He founded Regra Zero, which carried his songs around Rio's stages, including the Canecão. It was there he met Moína and Tajira Kilima, and that meeting became Do Brasil with Moína, released in 2010, a project celebrating Brazilian song.

Feeling the pull of another album, he left for Linha do Tempo: a polished record, where technology and refined mixing work shaped every track.

Disrupção: the voice, at last

Soon after a first encounter with herb, Rodrigo let go of productivism and consumerism and wanted to record something that presented his voice as it really was. That was where Disrupção began to emerge, recorded in 2019 with Cleidisleia, Ygor and Guilherme from the old Regra Zero circle, the triad back in the same room after years.

At the album's launch in 2020 he met Jehane Saade, with whom he gave performances exploring her dance within the theme of Disrupção, the album becoming a stage piece as well as a record.

MK, Stanley Jordan, Mike Stern

The myth had been dismantled at home long before. His father owned a bus, and helped with the production of Rock Estrela: music as work, gear in the luggage, a show that happens because someone drives, loads and sets it all up. Seeing it from the inside taught more than any mystique.

In 2000 came the encounters with the masters themselves: Mark Knopfler, crossed three times in Rio de Janeiro, plus Stanley Jordan and Mike Stern, close enough to see the gods of the guitar working up close. The lesson that stayed: the heroes are workers. Mastery is not magic; it is craft, repeated for decades, and it can be learned by anyone willing to put in the hours. The myth fell. The music remained.

The next album, in the post-LLM era

Today Rodrigo works on his next album, composed in the post-LLM era, a work about what remains human when machines learned to sing. On the horizon, at any moment now, the new work will be published.