It is after the ruin that it is necessary to come to the surface. In Restart, Tim Bernardes had already timidly rehearsed it. After immersing himself in songs at the end, in detailed and resigned descriptions of stories of broken hearts, he promised us with his song: “I won’t lock myself up forever.” He came out of the dark room forcing faith in the future, singing hopefully: “The pain of the end comes to purify.” Here he is now, no longer just resigned, no longer just a believer in what is to come, but amazed at what is really to come: the new album by the young prodigy of Brazilian music, thousand invisible thingsit’s an album of new Christian militant in the church of loving optimism.

It’s not that songs that stir the end of relationships aren’t still being heard around here (the clearest example, or at least less appeased, is “Olha”). And it’s not that the first album by the vocalist, composer and director of this tropical pop-rock branch that is the band O Terno was an album exclusively about heartbreak, exclusively to make the cobblestones cry: for each stab of love in the heart sung in “Ela” or “No”, one could hear consternation for Brazil (“Tanto Faz”) and a clear palate for worldly tragedies (“Little by little”).

thousand invisible things however, it is something else. We already intuit the individual, we confirm it after listening to the album: Tim Bernardes also sings joy today. It is perhaps the antidote that we needed to the old romantic thesis that it is in pain, suffering and the art that feeds on them that we find genius.

Lightness also makes great songs, joy is also a good fuel for art and singing.. The cynicism that surrounds and resists pleasure, the silly smile on the face, that listens to Tim Bernardes, as if he were sitting at the guitar watching an Atlantic sunset, singing “we won’t be so alone anymore”. beverages”. Or a little later, bright and happy, in slippers and Draft beer in hand, mustache and thick hair blowing in the wind, starting a song without fear (blessed be it) of sounding cheesy:

all the beauty
all the love
it’s nice
it’s really beautiful

Suddenly, a fiction comes to mind and we imagine João Gilberto Prado Pereira de Oliveira, the father of bossa nova, still alive, returning to his home retreat after a short walk down the street for, why not, a short dinner at Mariu’s, a restaurant in the Leme neighborhood on the south side of Rio de Janeiro, very close to Cocabana beach. We can already imagine him comfortably on the sofa, listening thousand invisible things, also smiling as he listens to young Tim sing that “the longing is gone” (“Really Beautiful”). Enough of nostalgia, let the sadness go.

To the old happy way of being sad, to the warm melancholy of someone who sings sorrows with grace and sweetness (as Gilberto sang in that painful song), the young singer-songwriter managed to add to his ear a serene song of whispered joys. thousand invisible things It is an album of songs that revolve permanently, obsessively and inevitably around emotions. In some cases they are almost short stories or short films, stories told and sung in minute detail, visually detailed. This, however, is no longer a surprise: it is just the already known talent of Tim Bernardes.

it’s not alone pain, beverages

We hear him summarize, as soon as the album begins, the complete cycle of life with unusual lucidity: Tim Bernardes singing in “Nascer, Viver, Morrer”, a song born and worked on unexpectedly outside the mission of composing a record, which he wants “living in reality / which is where it is possible”. We listen to him confident, a believer “in the world, in the mind, in the dream, in being”, certain of the importance of “in the rare and infinite moment of living”:

Things exist with force and magic.
and I am the conscience of what I am
I want and I love and I can and I will

It is as if the pains had already been digested, the sung “pathmarks” had already been faced with less tragedy, more naturally. It is no coincidence that the second song, “Fases”, begins with the illusion of the return of pain and moaning (“I think time is up / for us / something is behind us”) and then takes a turn:

Phases, phases are passing
I can’t fight anymore.
Fears, fears also pass,
I never stopped facing.
I bring marks of the road,
I lost the purity of childhood.
I treat sorrows with love,
They are already part of me.

It’s on “BB (Garupa de Moto Amarela)”, however, that’s the song we didn’t think we heard sung by Tim Bernardes: a love song without a but, a declaration-song with dripping honey, the musician defying “come out with me, I go out with you”, confess without fear of pyroeira “With you I dream with open eyes beverages / I want to love you and always see you up close“.

Perhaps it took a long way to go — a solo album, four albums with a band, adulthood — to be able to create a good love song without fear, without romanticizing suffering. It was necessary to sing first the lack of love (without lamechice), the broken hearts (revised in an illuminated way), the misunderstandings, until this musician from São Paulo (Maurício Pereira) tells us shamelessly, rocked by luminous percussion, guitar and violins, defying the old maxim that “all happy families are alike” and that is why it is better to tell other stories:

Let’s explore Santa Cecilia, baby
I follow you calmly.
you can follow me too
I’ll do you good
we can enjoy hand in hand.
You change everything and everything turns out so well,
thousand colors, best friends.
We won’t be so alone anymore, darling.
I’m counting on you, you can count on me

By now the printing press has been installed, yes Restart off the solo statement, thousand invisible things it is what we could call a consecration record: an album by a singer-songwriter at the height of creativityof one of the great singers of today’s Lusophony (the times of the adolescent voice of ’66), of an inventor of complex arrangements that do not overly complicate the song, do not remove the voice and the word from the center of the composition.

With Tim Bernardes we advance, from the soft joy at the end of the day of “Realmente Lindo” (in the voice the melancholy and stillness, in the applause and in the words the slow party) to “Meus 26”, a kind of review from the past, the voice that rises and falls without hesitation, the guitar playing high and low, São Paulo, Bahia, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro (“still pretty/but not very well”) reviewed as emotional lands, Brazil and personal biography are mixed serving as the engine of the song:

My country, my varied head
I want to be everything at once.
And my brief and unfinished vision
who looks at everything but does not see.
2020 will come as 2000 did,
What history repeats itself?
which one have we never seen?
Show Brazil to the world
or the world for Brazil.
(…)
Caught between an end and a beginning
or between the beginning and the end.
From heaven I recognize some mystery
that exists inside of me
Curves sometimes remind me of infinity
sometimes they remind me of the ending.
The world has a thousand invisible things
nothing is so concrete.

We go through “Falta”, a slightly less inspired song on the album, and land on “Velha Amiga”, a moving song addressed to an old love, like “Ela” and “Não” (from the previous album) already resigned but now it sounds more peace emotionally. Tim did “what he could”, and “you too”, but “trying to live on love alone / was not enough“.

The serenity is perhaps illusory here (is it?). Memories carry us, the “painful interrupted history”, the “old afternoons, us on the track / bicycles on the avenue”, the hope rescued from other people’s songs (with reference to the cover of “Detalhes”, by Roberto Carlos). And the bard admitting that he too had a “cold morning”:

From the kitchen I see the bed, It is empty.
Things change and now i have
wish well – and change too.

It’s time for “sufficiency” on the album —and Tim advances from “Velha Amiga” to “Olha”, if not the bloodiest song, then the most disenchanted, fired-up accusatory (“when I gave a truce, you wanted rematch / and I didn’t hesitate to go ahead (…) it ended in a scream / and the hatred I kept was mine with myself”), the restlessness that hovered and the lack of response to the million reais question: “How did we get to this point ?”.

The dense, heavy but heavy Brazilian tone (earth of density in flip flops) is maintained with “Esse Ar”. But it is in “A Última Vez” that Tim Bernardes returns to the great songs, taking us to a room and a movie scene, a passionate but fleeting and doomed reunion with an old girlfriend. The detail of the descriptions shows us the reunion scene by scene.

The climax arrives (“she sang and dragged me into the room / eye to eye, both naked / holding each other until the end”) but the memories return, “all the scars you made on me / and the sad marks I left I left on you “. The illusions are dispelled “of thinking that this was now only the will of the body”, he concludes sadly “I did not know how cold life was without your love / but sadder is knowing that we know that together it was also cold ” The ending makes the anthology song and disappointment less tragic, it is Tim Bernardes wisely pointing out that love, which is almost everything, is not always enough:

there’s nothing left for us
and maybe neither speak nor cry
because for us it’s over until the farewell
‘Cause we know, and maybe we always knew
That only apart we find a way out
is that sometimes you choose between love and the joy of living

At this point, we still have a feast of strings and melodies ahead of us, songs like “Mystify” (in which we hear him sing that “illusion is part of falling in love”), “Eternal Beauty” (the tiredness of not having “ how to rest”, the dissonance with modern daily life “of the cell phone, of the computer”) and “Luz” and its lesson that “leave behind / may be moving forward“.

But the album doesn’t end without hearing the hope of “A Balada de Tim Bernardes”, with its recipe for daily annoyances —“and why not sing? / and why not sing? —, with his satire on that “staging called becoming an adult” (“time is all together / without separation / without bar / without dot or line / without line”). And, perhaps even more illustrative of the tone of the album, with the love regeneration very clear:

I will dream, I will dream once more
because this dream is over, it is not an old dream that is going to end me
(…)
life is meant to be enjoyed and somehow i think i’m enjoying it
If by chance love calls one more time, I think I will
I want to go
I even think I’m already trying.

We end everything to the sound of “Esmo Se Você Não Vê” and, when we hear that “the sky is always starry / even if you don’t see it”, that “big doubts disappear / when the sun appears”, we confirm that Tim Bernardes is really New Evangelical Church of optimism and hope. He is not a pain denier, he is a believer in regeneration. And he sings it so carefully that even the most cynical now have reason to believe again.