Caetano Malta on ‘Eterna Juventude’, Rediscovering Play and Stepping Into His Own Musical World
After more than two decades spent writing, performing and creating alongside other artists, Caetano Malta is finally placing his own name at the centre of the story.
The São Paulo-born, Paris-based singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has built a career through collaboration. Lucas Santtana, Bixiga 70, Flavia Coelho, Guts, MOMO and Arto Lindsay are among the artists whose worlds he has entered at different points, absorbing lessons in songwriting, production and performance along the way.
Yet making his debut solo album was less a sudden reinvention than something that had gradually become unavoidable.
“It was inevitable,” Malta says. “I have always composed, and I had already made a few collaborative albums as well as others that I wasn't able to release or finish.”
A significant moment came with 2018’s Bambini. After sharing the songs with musician friends and receiving the encouragement to record them properly, Malta began trusting his own songwriting in a different way. “Years of practice had turned me into a good songwriter, so I gained a lot of confidence.”
That confidence eventually became Eterna Juventude, his debut solo album for Favorite Recordings. Its title translates as ‘Eternal Youth’, but the idea behind it reaches considerably further than nostalgia.
Malta began writing the record around the birth of his daughter. Through spending time with her, childhood memories started resurfacing alongside a broader idea about imagination and happiness.
“My theory is that the wisdom of happiness lies in the mind of a child.”
Central to that thinking is a Portuguese word Malta feels captures something particularly important: brincar.
Unlike jogar, which can describe playing a game or competing, brincar means playing without the intention of winning. It is play for its own sake, an act of imagination without a predetermined objective.
“It is playing purely to have fun, surrendering oneself to a world of imagination, fantasy, and enjoyment. It is the child's way of knowing how to live: being happy through imagination alone. That is the core of Eterna Juventude.”
Living in France sharpened that observation. Malta noticed what he sees as a greater separation between adult and children’s worlds than in cultures such as Italy, reinforcing his belief that play is something adults too easily leave behind.
Musically, that freedom arrives through a vocabulary developed thousands of miles away.
Growing up in São Paulo exposed Malta to a city whose musical identity he describes as “immense”. His father introduced him to MPB, Brazilian rock arrived during adolescence, while friends opened doors towards reggae and the psychedelia of Os Mutantes and Pink Floyd.
More importantly, São Paulo brought the rest of Brazil to him.
“That is São Paulo: all of Brazil is inside it.”
Working with artists from Alagoas, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Recife and Belém do Pará expanded that vocabulary further, leaving Eterna Juventude rooted not in one neatly defined São Paulo sound but what Malta calls a “borderless mixture”.
His years spent working with other artists proved equally formative. Malta describes those collaborations as having taught him “almost everything”, from watching friends construct songs to understanding record production, live shows and eventually the mechanics surrounding a musical career.
Three relationships stand out in particular.
“I learned—and continue to learn—especially from three very special people in my life: MOMO, Lucas Santtana, and Flavia Coelho.”
The result is music steeped in Brazilian tradition without approaching that history as something that needs to be consciously preserved. For Malta, those sounds are simply part of the language he grew up speaking.
“Brazilian music is inside us; it runs through our veins.”
That instinct makes unlikely combinations feel natural. Working with producer Bruno Buarque, Malta can ask for “a groove that's half Cartola, half Radiohead” and expect to be understood. Samba and psychedelic rock do not need to be treated as opposing traditions when both already exist within the musicians making the record.
The same instinct governs his melodies.
“I believe that melodies are always floating around us; if our channels are open, we can receive them.”
Only afterwards does the more cerebral work begin, developing those initial ideas into finished compositions and arrangements.
Moving from São Paulo to Paris altered Malta’s perspective on that process. Rather than weakening his connection with Brazilian music, distance strengthened it.
France also introduced new influences, particularly Congolese Rumba, but living abroad allowed Malta to recognise characteristics in his own approach that had previously seemed ordinary.
“The distance made me better perceive my uniqueness and my Brazilian style,” he says. “Clearly, we Brazilians think about music differently than the French do.”
For Malta, that difference manifests in an approach he considers more instinctive and closely connected to pleasure than technique. Recognising how distinctive that perspective could sound outside Brazil gave him greater confidence in his own identity.
That exchange can already be heard across the trajectory leading to Eterna Juventude. Bambini explored samba and psychedelic folk from a more intimate, mysterious perspective, while 2023 collaborative album Au Revoir Saudade moved towards tropical pop. His debut carries traces of both while opening another door through the Congolese guitar style he encountered after meeting guitarist Dizzy Majeku in Paris.
“They represent different phases of my life.”
The album’s production followed a similarly open process. Malta initially worked alone in his São Paulo studio, building guide tracks from drum machines, basslines, guitars and synthesisers before moving into Estúdio Minduca with Buarque to record acoustic drums, percussion and vocals.
Other musicians were invited in whenever the songs demanded something Malta could not provide himself.
“Sometimes playing all the instruments isn't enough; you need someone from the outside with fresh ears to hear something that is impossible to notice for those deeply involved in the process.”
On ‘Pra Se Molhar’, percussionist Denis Duarte unlocked a groove Malta and Buarque had struggled to find. Later, Guts listened with what Malta describes as his “sharp producer's ear”, offering small observations that helped bring the album over the finishing line.
There is something fitting about a debut carrying one artist’s name being so dependent on other people.
For Malta, becoming a solo artist has never meant retreating from collaboration. Instead, it changes his position within it.
After years spent supporting other artists, he is now discovering the very different experience of becoming a frontman and building his own band in France. The project has already brought together musicians with whom he feels both a musical and personal connection, alongside a new relationship with Favorite Recordings.
“My world is expanding, and I would love for this new chapter to take me on tour around the world alongside these friends.”
Even the growth of the project beyond himself matters. “It is also an incredible feeling to see the project growing and creating work for other people.”
Perhaps inevitably for somebody who waited more than 20 years to arrive at album number one, Malta is wasting little time thinking about what follows it. Two more albums are already being written.
Yet Eterna Juventude establishes something more important than the beginning of a conventional solo career. Its central idea, brincar, proposes creativity without competition, imagination without an objective and the possibility that making something can retain value simply because of the pleasure found in doing it.
After a career spent learning from musicians around him, Malta appears to have arrived at a deceptively simple conclusion.
“Being able to compose and record with friends is a blessing; it truly gives a greater meaning to existence.”
For Eterna Juventude, that sense of play is not a return to childhood so much as an argument for never completely leaving it behind. Grab your copy here.
