“O Samba É Meu Dom” holds a special beauty for me; making it to where you want to be and taking the time to be thankful to the ones who inspired you to get there in the first place. That’s what Wilson das Neves did in this song. He revered the people who deeply touched him and guided his steps towards his own path.

“The song is built in a poetic and cyclical way where he narrates his story in the verses, but always comes back to the same line - which is the title of the song. "O Samba É Meu Dom" [My Gift Is Samba]. It's a line that is repeated all over the song as a statement that his gift and mission in life was to live samba.

“And he lived… so much! He was like a walking history book; he took part in so many different moments of Brazilian music. The radio era, soap operas, movie soundtracks, music festivals. I mean, he recorded more than five hundred albums! His elegance, his constant love for research and search to learn more was deeply inspiring. This was a person who was 80 years old, created millions of fantastic things and still maintained the same discipline of waking up to study his instrument every day. He was devoted to it.

“In some places in Africa, they have a great saying for when someone important dies. They say that a Baobab has fallen. You know that tree, Baobab? It’s a symbol of life, a very mystical and secular tree. The lifespan can be as long as one thousand years, and in the forest, life happens around it. The aroma of the flowers attracts animals during reproduction; they are natural water tanks in dry regions; and, in some places, people even live inside of them - they are massive, really large and tall trees. So when a Baobab falls, it’s a loss of life.

“That’s what happened when Wilson Das Neves passed away - we lost a Baobab. He had a natural ability to speak to your heart and share what he had inside of his. He always made a point on the importance of proximity amongst people. There’s a lot of talk about how connected we are these days, but we are actually very distant as a society.

“Much is said about collectivism, but people are spending their lives being more distant from each other than ever. Most experiences are happening on an individual basis and this is very dangerous; it’s very dangerous to the world and to the human race. When we create our own individual set of views that separate us from others - and you stop acknowledging experiences that are different from yours - we also create cracks for hate to appear and grow.

“Wilson Das Neves was very aware of this and he used to constantly say that we need to stay close, stay together and stay strong together. When you climb up a step, you need to take people with you.

“There’s this thing he used to say to me, ‘Emicida, only bad people die.’ I didn’t understand what he was saying, thinking ‘No, no, a lot of good people are dying.’ When he passed away, I understood. He will never die - he will always be with us. When we speak about him and people carry the stories they shared with him, you realise that his energy still is very present over here.

“I think he was an orixá [a deity from candomble, an Afro-Brazilian religion] that we had the privilege of knowing in life. Spending time with him was like going to University - it changed my life.”

“Sometimes I sit by the computer, type the name of a country I have never been and research their culture. I dive into their food, their recipes, attractions… and their music. That’s how I came across Sauti Sol.

“I’ve never been to Kenya and I was reading this Twitter account about their street food. Question: What does Emicida do on his days off? Answer: He looks at recipes of countries he’s never been to, ha ha! Anyway, someone posted this band on that Twitter page, I researched it and the first song that came up was this one. I was like ‘Wow!’ It blew my mind and I haven’t stopped listening to it since then.

“I went so crazy about “Kuliko Jana” that I took the time to translate it. The lyrics are incredible. I thought they were singing about some kind of deity but it’s actually a Christian song. The signs that appear throughout the lyrics are African, but the main presence in the chorus is Jesus (Yesu). The character sings about his sins, and how he believes he will overcome them, because each day Jesus loves him more and he has the chance to be better than he was yesterday.

“It’s been five years now since I started to get more familiar with demonstrations of spirituality in music. I believe that music itself is a spiritual expression and this song summarised what I was longing for, which was the kind of atmosphere you need when you want people to get in touch with spirituality through a song. This is not about religion, nor about any religious institution or any set of codes. It’s about connecting with the universe; connecting with something bigger than ourselves. “Kuliko Jana” became like a mantra to me, like a prayer that I go to when I’m feeling low. It takes me to a meditative state.

“It’s a song entirely made from the human body. There are no instruments, only voices making the rhythm, harmony and singing in a choir. The band are like crooners singing on the top of an arrangement composed by the voices of the choir. It is such a special energy - I lived inside this song.”

“Carlos, who works with us as a driver, is the king of music USB sticks. These days, camelôs [unofficial street vendors from Brazil] no longer sell CDs - they sell music on USB sticks, all kinds of genres. Let’s say you like… classic rock, you can buy a compilation with a thousand songs of it.

“Carlos had many of these and we used to listen to them when we were driving. Amongst them, there was a samba-rock and soul one that had “Cool Cat” on it. I didn’t know this song when I first heard of it. When I went to research it, I almost didn’t believe it was by Queen! It doesn’t sound like the other songs we know by them, it’s a true B-side.

“When I listen to a song I like, I take my time on the lyrics and I can get very caught up in them. This song, I find especially intriguing, because I still don’t really know if he is singing about a human or a cat. A cool cat, ha ha! I mean, it could be both. I was in London recently and I listened to this song a lot when I was over there. There were moments that I was like; ’No brother, it’s definitely a human’ but then I would go ‘Wait, is it? It could well be a cat, the cool cat.’

“I am fascinated by these possibilities of open interpretations, because life itself is many things and there are endless ways to look at it. We are living in a time when a lot of people wish that art was only this one thing, but that’s not possible. That kind of closed interpretation, with a predefined intention, we can leave for advertisements. Not for art. Art has to be interpreted in a thousand ways, you know? It’s part of its nature. I think the possibility of duality in this song is great.

“And there’s the arrangement. Absolutely brilliant. The guitar of our song “Cananéia, Iguape e Ilha Comprida” was totally inspired by “Cool Cat”; it was on repeat in the studio when we recorded it. I’m fascinated by the simplicity of it. It’s easy to get people’s attention when you have a full orchestra, it is very difficult to do that with very few elements. To create something sophisticated and simple, and then get people to feel a lot from a little, is magic.”

“Everybody Loves The Sunshine” gets me thinking that what we need to do with music is the same thing that the sunset does to humans: it embraces everyone. Everyone acknowledges its beauty, because it’s clearly beautiful but also because it’s free and available to everyone. I think a lot about that; about the meaning behind the sunset and about how to create music with that same atmosphere, that same message.

“When we look at soul and black music, they were singing about love in a very dense and sad time. A lot of those songs were written in the middle of this fierce, relentless fight for civil rights in the USA. There were a lot a racial crimes happening constantly, and, still, what they chose to share in their music was love. That was the way they found to bring hope to a different tomorrow.

“This was one of my main quests on my last record, AmarElo. To create a lightened-up atmosphere, like the one the colour yellow brings to us - a space of light, heat and warmth. I wanted to make something similar to what Roy creates in this song - a channel to share love.”

“One of the things I really like about Afrobeat - and Fela Kuti in particular - is the length of the songs: they are long.

"When a song is extensive, to me it suggests that we are being guided to this place that is similar to a trance. I’m fascinated by how this state can get you to start seeing life in a different way, like meditation does. If you try to meditate without emptying your mind, you don’t concentrate on anything and you miss the opportunity of connecting with yourself. Now, when you take the most basic, and often the most neglected, thing we have - breathing - and focus on it, you gain it all.

“This song creates a similar experience. “Water No Get Enemy” is serene. It takes its time to happen and to fully present all of its elements - piano, keyboard, drums, bass, guitar - but while they develop, you’re in there, flowing, and being conducted towards this daze, where the title is repeated several times ‘Water has no enemies.’

“This has a lot to do with what we spoke about Gilberto Gil and that philosophy where water is the main reference. A different logic from this, is that justifies our existence with production, as if we are alive to work. This is a very dangerous way of thinking, especially in the times we live in now. It encourages people to acknowledge nature as a mere battery that enables human beings to exist - a simple stock of elements necessary for life on Earth. No! That’s not the way it goes. We exist inside of nature, and nature exists inside of a bigger cycle. We are part of nature, and nature is not here to be seen as a reservoir for our needs.

“Fela Kuti injected new fuel into Nigerian music: he connects with tradition at the same time as making a dialogue with youth. His music was political and positioned itself against the government in a very direct, straight way. This matched the outrage of young people that was bursting out all over the globe - especially in the American continent, where descendants of people who had been enslaved were seeking to regain everything that was stolen from them. And still are.

“Water No Get Enemy” was like premium fuel. It said: ‘This is grandiose, this is beautiful, sophisticated, intellectual - and it is black.’ It’s ours. It comes from us and this is the kind of grandiosity we need to defend ourselves. That wasn’t only coming from Fela’s music. You had Malcom X in the USA, you had Abdias de Nascimento in Brazil. In Brazil, you also have samba continuously consolidating itself as a place of resistance. Fela Kuti used to speak about that; about how music can be a weapon, and samba was very effective in that sense. It brought our self-esteem back to us. It was music being used as a weapon of freedom. If we were to wait for history books or entertainment to do that, we would be a hundred years late.

“Unfortunately, a lot of people still can’t understand the depth of this - the depth of this shout for freedom that samba brings. They get to a place where they overstep different ways of existing to prioritise and centralise a specific one. Centrism is a very dangerous thing. Many lives were lost because of this way of thinking, that sees Earth as the absolute centre of the universe.

“Look at the world from a humbler perspective, and there are no issues with Darwin’s theory of evolution. For some people it’s very offensive to consider that at some point in history we were monkeys, because of this thought that perceives humans as the centre of all things, of the sun and the universe - God’s greatest creation. This is threatening, not only because of its vanity, but also because it’s not based on reality. It comes from a very limited and ignorant perspective about what surrounds us.

“One expression of it is Eurocentrism. We live in a world where there are many different ways for societies to structure and develop themselves, thousands of ways to comprehend human life, and think of philosophy, art, technology, architecture that are beyond Europe. This is not to diminish the European contribution to the world. It’s important to recognise it, but it is crucial that we question what our necessities are in the 21st century. It’s urgent for us to start understanding other epistemologies, other forms of organization - I believe our salvation will come from there.

“I don’t think cars, computers, mobile phones or scooters will save the human race. It will be the capacity to look at another human-being and to recognise their humanity as a field that connects all of us. It’s from there that we can understand how to individually contribute with the world and then work towards it. It’s pointless to be an astronaut, biologist, civil engineer, a scientist or a millionaire if, first of all, we can’t be human.

“Let’s think about why water has no enemies. What would be water’s main purpose? To create life. It doesn’t create life out of love or hate, it just does what it’s meant to do. And this, a lot of the time, is beyond the comprehension of a human being. For example, when there are floods and human life suffers from it, it can be hard to not build an emotional perspective of it as an element of nature.

"Water is what it is, and it does what it does. Wherever it passes, it opens the possibility for a new kind of life to be born. In the end, life always wins. It might not be ours, but life still overcomes.”

AmarElo is out now via Sterns/Laboratório Fantasma