Leo Jaime participates in a show in Rio de Janeiro (RJ) in tribute to Erasmo Carlos (1941 – 2022) Rodrigo Goffredo ? FIRST PERSON OF THE SINGULAR ? “Life sucks”. Forty years before Fernanda Torres declared that life sucks (a lot!) when she received the Golden Globe for best actress in January 2025 for her portrayal of Eunice Paiva (1929 – 2018) in the film “I'm still here” (2024), Leo Jaime said exactly the opposite in the title of the beautiful and melancholic ballad “A vida não presta”, presented by the artist from Goiás in 1985 as the third of the ten tracks on the album “Afternoon Session”, the most successful title in Leo Jaime’s discography. This association between the actress's speech and the name of Leo's song came to mind when I watched the singer's participation in the tribute show to Erasmo Carlos (1941 – 2022) presented by Malu Rodrigues and the Tremendão band on the night of Thursday, July 2, at Manouche, a music venue in Rio de Janeiro (RJ). I didn't know that Leo Jaime would participate in the show, but I was happy with the surprise of seeing him on the scene. Especially because Erasmo himself saw Leo as a kind of successor in the Brazilian rock dynasty. Maybe life would be better if Leo Jaime was more revered. Yes, from the 1990s onwards, life and the market seem to have been unfair to the now 66-year-old singer, songwriter, actor and writer. Throughout the 1980s, Leo released five albums. The first, “Phodas C” (1983, an album with a technopop tone and an irregular repertoire), was followed by “Sessão da tarde” (1985, LP with side A with an impeccable pop finish), “Vida difficult” (1986, the artist’s first sigh of maturity with the beautiful song “Nothing changed”), “Direct from my heart to yours” (1988, a romantic album on which the singer re-recorded “Gatinha manhosa”, a hit by Erasmo Carlos in 1966) and “Avenida das desilusões” (1989, an album immersed in a universe in disenchantment that brought a fluent approach to “Índios”, a song from Legião Urbana’s second album). The sequence of these five albums seemed to suggest a luminous career for Leo Jaime. But everything went downhill in the 1990s. Switching from the CBS record label to Warner Music would prove to be a bad deal for the artist. The singer's clash with the recording company after the release of the album “Sexo, drops e rock'n'roll” (1990) – an unsuccessful attempt to make Leo return to a teenage universe that no longer fit in with a man of 30 years of age – put Leo Jaime in Warner's refrigerator. It took five years until the singer returned to the music market with a good album, “Todo Amor” (1995). But then the world was already different, Brazil's soundtrack was already different and Leo Jaime missed the bandwagon of musical history, having to reinvent himself professionally by focusing on the jobs of actor, columnist and TV program writer. Having debuted in the cast of the musical “Os saltimbancos” (1977/1978), Leo was already a multimedia artist before the term was created. Since then, Leo Jaime has released only one more (good) album, “Interlúdio”, released in 2008. Personally, I have always been saddened by the dissonances in Leo Jaime's musical trajectory from the 1990s onwards. Maybe because I listened a lot to the album “Sessão da tarde”, an irresistible youth treatise on love and disillusionment from the perspective of loosers or, in good Portuguese, poor boys in love with girls with better social conditions. From a personal perspective, Leo Jaime also marked an unforgettable moment in my life. I was 33 years old in 1998 when I went to Teatro da Praia, in the Rio neighborhood of Copacabana, to watch the show “Fotografia”, in which Leo joined Leoni – a composer with a good command of the pop language and revealed as a member of the group Kid Abelha in the year in which Leo released his first album – to review their songbooks. There were just the two of them on the theater stage and, at a certain point during the performance, Leo and Leoni spoke – with a certain nostalgia – about the modernity of the 1980s, about life and songs from their youth. There, in that flash of the “Fotografia” show, I realized – without suffering, but with some astonishment – ??that I wasn’t young anymore either. Today, on the eve of turning 61, I understand that there is beauty in the entire inexorable flow of life and that it, life, always works, even if it is often difficult and unfair. Yes, Leo Jaime, Fernanda Torres is right. Life pays...