Lô Borges, a legend of Brazilian popular music and one of the founders of the Clube da Esquina musical collective, died on Sunday, November 2. Borges’ family confirmed the news in a statement posted to his official social media pages. According to Folha de S.Paulo, the musician had been hospitalized for a drug-related infection, and Borges’ family wrote, in Portuguese, that he “fought bravely for 17 days.” Borges was 73 years old.
The sixth of 11 children, Salomão Borges Filho was born in 1952, in Belo Horizonte, the capital and largest city in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. As teenagers, Borges and his older brother Márcio became associated with a group of musicians who gathered at the corner of Rua Divinópolis and Rua Paraisópolis in the neighborhood of Santa Tereza to smoke, hang out, make music. Their “corner club,” as it came to be known, blended MPB—música popular brasileira, one of the dominant styles of Brazilian music during the 1960s—with jazz, psychedelic rock, and the Beatles’ baroque pop.
Among those musicians was Milton Nascimento, who was about 10 years older than Borges and had moved from the town of Três Pontas to Belo Horizonte in 1963. A rising international star following his performance at the inaugural MPB festival in 1965, Nascimento co-wrote two songs on his 1970 album Milton, “Para Lennon e McCartney” and “Clube da Esquina,” alongside the Borges brothers. Lô was planning to join the Brazilian army at 18, but Nascimento invited him to Rio de Janeiro to work on another project.
Despite arriving deep in the midst of Brazil’s oppressive junta dictatorship, that album, 1972’s Clube da Esquina, became one of the most influential and acclaimed records in the country’s musical history. Borges claimed writing credits on eight out of 21 tracks, including “O Trem Azul,” album opener “Tudo que Você Podia Ser,” and “Paisagem da Janela,” a song whose recording was originally blocked by federal censors. “When I would speak of those morbid things/When I would speak of those sordid men,” he sings, in Portuguese, in the chorus, “When I would speak of this storm/You didn’t listen/You don’t want to believe/But that’s so normal.”
The same year as Clube da Esquina’s release, Borges, still only 19, shared his self-titled solo debut, colloquially known as Disco do Tênis (“sneaker album”). He reportedly became overwhelmed by his label’s demand for new material, however, and went quiet for much of the 1970s. He eventually resurfaced at the tail end of the decade on several songs from Nascimento’s Clube da Esquina 2 in 1978 and his own sophomore solo effort, A Via-Láctea, in 1979. He put out four more albums throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and had a late-career hit in 2003 with “Dois Rios,” a song he co-wrote for the Brazilian ska-punk band Skank.
