6 Questions with Perdido
🔀 Shuffle Sundays #94 • An interview with Perdido, and more!
🗣️ » Perdido, by Perdido
an interview with Perdido on his new album, nostalgia, romantic movies, songwriting, and the best ways to support an independent artist right now
Perdido, fka Marcelo Perdido, is a singer-songwriter, videomaker, and animator from Brazil who I had the opportunity to work with several times for his first 4 albums, where I created the promotional portraits that accompanied each album.
A lot of artists name their debut albums with their own names, but you decided to do that on your 6th release. Since you recently changed your stage name to just “Perdido”, do you feel that this new album marks a new artistic cycle in your career?
Absolutely, it feels like the beginning again. Mainly because the music industry changed a lot recently, and I never tried to truly adapt myself, but now I’m in this new vibe of playing their game.
Your music always gave me a nostalgic feeling, mixed with experiences not yet lived, almost like a Deja Vu. What are your inspirations when writing music?
For this album, I wanted to use romantic movies as an inspiration, these classic ones of our generation… So there is some sort of “past” in the lyrics, but I wanted to try and diversify a little more so that other types of couples outside of the “blond man with blond woman” could identify as well. It was an attempt to make a summary and remake of some movies.
Many of your lyrics are extremely visual, at least to me. When you write your songs, do you already have possible music videos in mind? How does your process work?
I normally write with images, visualizing what’s in the lyrics, but on my own repertory, which must be different from others. But for every word or phrase I put in a song I’m visualizing it in my mind. In the beginning, I used to call these music videos, but I think now I may be already composing with short reels or tiktoks in mind.
Even though you had many artists featured in your other albums, this seems to be your most ‘collaborative’ yet. Not just in the number of features, but to me, it has much more of a ‘band’ sound than the previous ones. Do you have this perception as well?
I think nothing will beat Brasa (2018) in that sense, because each song was made with a different person, but I see that one less as an album and more as a ‘tropical-opera-rock’. But I understand this feeling of sounding more like a band, as a unity that we reached with the music, and I like that, the whole album feels connected, right?
The participation of Teago Oliveira made me notice the similarities between your compositions and his band Maglore, which recently released a beautiful album too. Do you think that nowadays there are not as many bands/artists investing in songwriting? I can’t think of many other names besides yours, Maglore, Terno Rei…
There are a lot of people doing that, but I think the vocabulary sometimes is more poetic… I try to write in a more direct way, which may even be deep, but the phrases are built with not many grammatical frills. I think that Teago does the same thing, and that’s why our collaboration worked so well in Carnaval.
Knowing that artists make close to no money from streaming services, what is the best way for fans to support independent/new artists these days?
I think the best way to support an independent artist is to be a part of their journey. Spreading the word, interacting with their content, in and out of social media, and I say content instead of music because… nowadays an artist needs to do a lot of things and end up spilling out to various channels. I was lately working on an animation for a theater play that someone referred me to through Instagram. It’s not black and white anymore, and this new way of doing things helps me to pay the bills that the streamings don’t.
Where can people find you online and listen to your beautiful music?
I’m @perdido on Instagram, which is where I’m most active, and repurpose its content in other places. To listen to my music, I particularly use Spotify, which is the service in which I was able to properly organize my discography after changing my name.
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⚡️ Visual Inspiration
Tony Babel is a multidisciplinary designer, animator & illustrator creating vintage animated loops inspired by old cartoons. Check out his Instagram for more. Here are some favorites:
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