If one day a soundtrack of the first months of the pandemic in Portugal is made, the theme will certainly be heard in the middle fire beast, hitchhiking from which the album 100% charisma, the second of Vaiapraia, became a serious case of popularity. And it just wasn’t because it lacked that fundamental step for an affirmation of a record, the stage, especially for a work like this, full of nerves, without false shame and straight to the point. “We still gave a few concerts after the first confinement, with limited capacity and everyone wearing masks, but I had the same feeling that this album deserved a lot more stage”, admits Rodrigo Vaiapraia, whose life has also changed a lot since the beginning of the pandemic.

As early as March 2020, following the start of the first confinement, I learned that I had entered a Masters in Creative Writing in Glasgow on a Gulbenkian Fellowship. A change that would have been temporary, but ended up becoming a little more permanent, as she tells DN: “I met my current boyfriend there and decided to move to London with him.” As a result of all these changes, the Vaiapraia project was left fallow, as was the music. “I was still doing some things in Glasgow, but then I turned away from music a bit, because I was studying writing and my focus was different”, he recalls. During this period, he made only one soundtrack for the play This Thing Called Love (Ten Years Later), for the multidisciplinary collective Plataforma 285, which, by coincidence, also debuted last week at the CCB, in Lisbon.