Rio de Janeiro, BR · mpb · rock

Paulinho Moska

1 upcoming festival

An MPB songwriter with a rock past, known for restless records and a conversational stage presence.

Born Paulo Corrêa de Araujo in Rio de Janeiro on 27 August 1967, Moska picked up the classical guitar at 13 with a group of friends. He later trained in theater and cinema at Rio's Casa de Artes de Laranjeiras, and before settling on music he sang with Garganta Profunda, a band that moved between the Beatles, Tom Jobim, and medieval opera.

In 1987 he founded the pop-rock group Inimigos do Rei with old bandmates Luiz Nicolau and Luis Guilherme. He went solo in the early 1990s under the name Paulinho Moska, carrying a rock sensibility into a songwriting style rooted in MPB.

His records sit between those two worlds, often stripped down to voice and electric guitar, and he regularly reworks his own songs from one album to the next rather than treating them as fixed. On stage he talks between numbers at length, letting the room's response shape the set.

He created Zoombido, a long-running interview programme in which he sits with fellow Brazilian songwriters and takes their songs apart line by line.

Moska has also worked in film, playing the hitman Enoque in José Henrique Fonseca's O Homem do Ano in 2001, alongside earlier roles in Mulher and Amores Possíveis.

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