The Vinyl Revival in Brazil is Saving a 77-year-old Singer – and Others – from Oblivion

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SAO PAULO (AP) — It took Brazilian singer Catia de Franca nearly half a century to find her audience, but she’s finally done it — with the help of nearly outdated audio technology.

Born in Paraíba, a state in Brazil’s poor northeast, de Franca, 77, was long overlooked with her blend of psychedelic rock, traditional rhythms and modernist poetry, even as she toured the country in the 1970s and 1980s.

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During the pandemic, she retreated to a nature reserve in the mountains above Rio de Janeiro, “where you can’t even imagine that there is an internet signal,” she told The Associated Press.

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Then one day in 2021, her phone rang. It was the co-founder of an independent label in Sao Paulo who wanted to reissue her 1979 debut album “20 Palavras ao Redor do Sol” (20 Words Around the Sun) on vinyl.

“I thought, ‘This must be a prank,'” de Franca recalls. “He started talking to me and I realized that wasn’t the case.”

Since then, De Franca has come into the spotlight, with fans and concerts in the alternative circuit.

Their belated fame is largely due to a comeback in Brazil, where records outsold CDs and DVDs last year for the first time in decades. According to Pro-Musica, a coalition of Brazil’s largest record companies, sales in 2023 doubled year-on-year to 11 million reais ($2.2 million) and were more than 15 times higher than in 2019. And this Figures only include new releases, as second-hand sales are difficult to track.

The used record market never completely died and is now on the rise, said Carlos Savalla, a 66-year-old music producer in Rio who owns more than 60,000 records.

There are thousands of vinyl dealers on websites and Facebook groups, while local aficionados and foreign hunters scour fairs, flea markets and used record stores in search of samba, bossa nova, tropicalismo and Brazilian pop music LPs to add to their collection to complete.

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Vinyl’s comeback in Brazil follows a global trend of the last 15 years. According to the Recording Industry Association of America, in the United States alone, record revenue reached $1.4 billion in 2023. The recent renewed American interest is sometimes attributed to Taylor Swift, whose 2022 album “Midnights” was the first major album release since 1987 to top CD sales in vinyl. That year, Swift was responsible for one of 25 vinyl albums sold in the United States

In Brazil, the rising interest isn’t due to top artists not even releasing records, said Marcelo Froes, a music journalist and researcher. Rather, today’s buyers are listeners interested in picking up classic albums and discovering new artists or once-unknown musicians.

By 2008, all of Brazil’s vinyl factories were closed. But inspired by a revival in Europe and the US, producer João Augusto and his partners decided to buy – and revive – a former vinyl pressing line: Polysom.

“We started reissuing old albums with great commercial appeal and demand. Now the factory supplies record labels and independent artists and re-releases old albums,” said Luciano Barreira, general manager of Polysom.

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Fifteen years later, Polysom ​​has pressed 1.3 million records and competitors opened two more factories in Brazil. One of them pressed a small edition of a grant-financed record for da Franca in 2019.

It was also around this time that João Noronha, a 32-year-old sound engineer, found his vinyl rhythm, teaming up with two friends in 2019 to create the Tres Selos label, offering subscribers a freshly minted record by mail every month.

“We didn’t expect much,” Noronha said, but in the first month of release, 120 subscribers requested the reissue of “Sinceramente,” a 1982 album by Sergio Sampaio, a Brazilian singer from the 1970s and 1980s.

One of Noronha’s partners, Rafael Cortes, noted that de Franca’s rare 1979 debut album fetched as much as 700 reais ($135) on the used market. When the partners got the green light from her former label for a reissue, they decided it was time to call the singer in her mountain hideout.

“She was extremely suspicious and asked, ‘Who are you?’ ‘Where are you from?’ Cortes recalled.

“I think their mistrust comes from the fact that the industry has often pushed them aside,” he said. “Imagine her, a black, lesbian woman from the Northeast in the 1970s who never made any concessions and stood by who she was: a fierce person, firm in her principles.”

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De Franca began as a musical director in plays and then branched out into acting, touring with some of the country’s most popular artists in the 1970s. She avoided traditional arrangements and used unusual instruments such as the accordion and 12-string guitar, making her music significantly different from the prevailing sound.

This kind of non-commercial output made her record label, the Brazilian subsidiary of Columbia Records, reluctant to spend money on advertising, said music writer Chris Fuscaldo.

“She didn’t get a big marketing effort from the label or the promotional investments that others did,” said Fuscaldo, author of the book “1979 – O ano que resignificou a MPB” (1979 – The year that redefined Brazilian popular music). .

But Fuscaldo, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on the erasure of women from Brazilian music history, believes that de Franca’s oppression at the time is what makes her so attractive today: Her unique style hasn’t become boring.

The 2,000 copies of the new edition “20 Palavras” quickly sold out among Tres Selos club members and other individual buyers.

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Isadora Attab, a 35-year-old designer, was thrilled when she first heard it.

“She’s absolutely brilliant – the artist I wish I had known as a teenager when I started listening to crazy American rock stars like Bob Dylan,” Attab said at a recent concert where she snapped up the penultimate copy on sale. “I look at this cover and imagine the album being displayed in my home. I want that woman’s face looking at me all day long.”

While small, independent labels focus on highlighting exiles from the pantheon of Brazilian pop music, larger companies want a piece of the action too.

Universal Music’s Brazilian subsidiary launched its own vinyl club in 2022, pushing out albums by some of the country’s greats such as Gilberto Gil, Chico Buarque, Rita Lee and Maria Bethania. It also sells imported records by foreign artists, from Billie Eilish to the Beatles to Ella Fitzgerald.

De Franca may continue to remain in the shadows, but now she has a spotlight to call her own. On April 19, she took the stage in a warehouse converted into a sought-after venue for independent artists in São Paulo. The house was full of 30- and 40-year-olds, some with their own children in tow. They shouted “Wonderful!” and I love you!” as stage lights reflected on de Franca’s short, cloud-like hair, which glowed against her dark skin.

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“I’m presenting a new record when many thought I wouldn’t make another one,” she said with a broad smile. “These songs have always accompanied me, but they were dormant.”

A 12-string played a hinterland melody while de Franca kept the rhythm going with Afro-Brazilian rattles called caxixis. Then she began her first song and let her lyrics flow:

“I was reborn, rising like a phoenix from the ashes and troubling my enemies…”

After her show, she left the stage and someone placed woolen clothes over her shoulders to protect her from the evening chill. She could have been mistaken for just another older woman, rather than the rock star she eventually became.

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AP video journalist Lucas Dumphreys in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.

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Follow AP’s coverage of Latin America and the Caribbean at https://apnews.com/hub/latin-america

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