The word “pagode” (pronounced, approximately, pa-go-jee) in the title Estudando O Pagode, is the name for a style of party music that’s a stripped-down sub-genre of samba, born in Brazil in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Zé reminds me, however, that before the term referred to a kind of music, it was a disparaging name for someone who is unreliable, dishonest, a sort of sly hustler. Pagode also carries class implications. Zé lives on a street of high rise apartments in São Paulo and his building is flanked by buildings that house working class residents on one side and elite residents on the other. Pagode is extremely popular among Brazil’s working class (some albums sell in the millions), and Zé hears the music coming from the more modest apartments every weekend. Yet the music is disparaged by the elites who live on the same block.

Zé also notes, however, that pagode itself is a very masculine form, full of sexually derogatory language; there is a bottle dance performed to the music in which a woman grinds suggestively over a bottle that stands on the floor between her legs. Pagode, then, is a fitting touchstone for Zé’s album: the record is based on a music that has been excluded and marginalized, but also itself excludes and marginalizes. On new song “O Amor É Um Rock”, a series of choruses curse love over a blunt, wah-wah-heavy guitar riff, saying, “Love is egotistical,” “Love cares only for itself,” and “Love is a rock song/ And it’s personality is pagode.”

At their most immediate, Tom Zé’s songs sound like the inspired machinations of a genius who’s just a little bit mad—a little bit crazy. Yet as I spoke with him and listened to him chatter in Portuguese, it seemed like the craziness—the circularity, the intentional obfuscations, the contradictions—somehow came closer than anything straightforward to touching the elusive capital-t Truths that music strives for, almost like those half-life fractions from ninth grade biology that keep approaching zero even though they can never quite get there.

While working on the transcription soon after our interview, I noticed something that I hadn’t noticed during the actual conversation. When Zé said that he’s not a part of the great line of Brazilian tunesmiths, he added, “the sirens don’t sing to me” rather than “the muses don’t speak to me.” It could have just been a matter of translation, but still, the distinction between the two seems important: the muses inspire the poet, while the sirens drive their listeners insane. Before talking to him, I would’ve imagined Zé as an Odysseus-like character, a proud and brave eccentric who would stuff wax in the ears of his crew but lash himself to the mast of the ship so he could listen to the sirens without wrecking the boat on the rocks—someone who would have it both ways. But perhaps the rest of us are the ones trying to be the brave warrior-hero Odysseus, going mad as the sirens sing for us, and Zé’s got the wax in his ears. He’s aware of what’s going on around him, but is ultimately willfully lost—maybe working on some new lyrics, figuring out how to make music on his new computer and, after six o’clock, listening thoughtfully as his wife reads aloud to him.