Give Thanks: Sessa Returns With the Lush Pequena Vertigem de Amor
- Josh Kitchen
- 3 days ago
- 7 min read
By: Josh Kitchen / November 25, 2025
Sergio Sayeg has only been making music under the moniker Sessa for six years now,
but the São Paulo native’s classically Brazilian-influenced oeuvre sounds as if it’s been floating around in the musical ether for decades. Earlier this month, Sessa released his third studio album, Pequena Vertigem de Amor, and it’s his best one yet. On his first two records, Grandeza and Estrela Acesa, Sessa leaned into more studio-adorned elements like strings and a traditional Brazilian backing trio.
On Pequena, he’s following the muse more organically, trusting his instincts as he reaches for what makes his artistry so special — pulling something out of nothing, and keeping the listener guessing as he takes you on a musical journey paved by artists like Caetano Veloso, Gal Costa, and Tom Zé, but filtered through his signature chameleonic prowess. He blends folk elements and keyboard explorations into what made listeners cheer him on back on his 2019 debut. I spoke with Sessa about the new record, the ways in which songs like his evolve on the road, becoming a father, and what people often misunderstand about Brazilian culture.
Pequena Vertigem de Amor feels like a winter record to me. Maybe I'm being influenced by when I first heard it, but I put it on and want to smoke a cigarette, sit by a fire… it’s fresh and airy and seasonal. Was that intentional?
It wasn't, to be honest. But I think that’s part of the fun and the pleasure of putting the music out. The record is mine, and only maybe my friends hear it before it comes out. But once it’s out, it becomes more open-ended. That’s how poetry works — it’s outside the narrow logic of language. Numbers are fixed: the 18th of November is not the 19th or the 17th; it’s just the 18th. There’s no interpretation. But poetry is an expansion of meanings. I think music exists within that — one way to see it.
That’s one of the reasons I love going to any kind of music. When I listen, I create a new normal in my mind — how the music feels to me. It’s beautiful when someone else feels the complete opposite. For you, how has your sound evolved from “Grandeza” to now? What feels newly sharpened in your creative voice?
I feel like this record is more open. I’m a less strict conceptual artist now. Those things were really cool when I was deeply in touch with them — like making a fully acoustic record with no cables. But I was also dealing with my limitations. Grandeza is a very empty record: nylon guitar, lots of vocals and percussion, and then the free jazz band comes in and destroys everything occasionally. I was very aware and selective about what sounds came in. Estrela Acesa is similar — a wider palette, strings, which were a dream sound for me.
For the second record, I had a classic backing band — a Brazilian-style power trio — and the strings gave it dramatic scale. There’s flute, there are singers. Still limited, but bigger.
This new record is more like taking things as they come. I wanted something to push me outside my familiar writing place, which was the acoustic guitar. I started having a tiny crisis with it — like, I’ve been playing this instrument nonstop for six years.
So I went to keyboards. I wrote as I lived. Everything you hear on this record is everything I wrote in that period — no leftovers. I just made what I had to make. That’s interesting compared to the first record, where I had songs for years and no one was waiting for anything, so I took my time. The second record had leftovers, and the pandemic made time strange. This one was: okay, I’m making a record now. It coincided with the arrival of my son. It was a very raw emotional moment, and I wrote and recorded through it.
I love that. And you can feel that in the record — even though it’s more acoustic and less adorned, it still feels very “you.” It still feels like a Sessa record, like you didn’t lose what makes your music special.
Thank you. It’s still very intentional. There are more sounds — keys, bells…
It sounds very natural — not synthetic at all.
It’s open-ended. There’s more freedom. Everything I wrote that became a full song is on there. There’s freshness from that, and from the playing. It’s the first record I’ve made while being more stable in São Paulo. My studio — with my co-producer Biel — is ready to go now. Before, we had to drive equipment, hook it up in a house, set everything up.
Now the keyboards are just there. The studio is 15 minutes walking from my house, so there’s freedom to just go. I self-recorded the previous record, and friends helped with the first. The first was rushed and wild; the second was already comfortable. This one is even more so. The sound is a bit less raw because we’ve developed our studio sound, but my life changed a lot with fatherhood. I honestly didn’t know how to make a record with everything shifting. So I made a record about all of it.
It feels like without that life change, this record couldn’t exist in the same way.
For sure. I don’t know what my life would’ve been otherwise — that’s a non-issue. But it was scary at times: like, do I still have this? It feels good to see things find their place. It’s powerful.
Some of my favorite musicians made their best music after becoming fathers — John Lennon, Father John Misty. Life changes like having a child make you think about things you couldn’t have thought about before.
Totally.
You come from, and are deeply connected to, the lineage of Brazilian songwriting — Caetano, Gal Costa, Tom Zé. How do you consciously place yourself within that tradition?
I’m a student of that tradition — the tradition of song, and the way the sound developed, the places you can go. But I’m also making music in a radically different context from the 60s and 70s. There’s something very “now” about it. People call my music retro sometimes. Sure, that’s one way to see it — but recorded music as an art form is so young. People have been painting on canvas for ages, and even that is nothing in human history.
I do what feels good to me. I answer the responsibility of the artist: to engage with beauty, with my idea of beauty. These sounds are beautiful to me, so I go after them. I’m not choosing from a catalog of sounds — I’m following what answers something in me.
We record mostly live to tape. I use a computer too — I’m not a purist — but I try to solve the heart of the music there, in the room. If it’s not there, you record over it, talk about it, fine-tune the feeling, eventually get it. There’s not much to do after that.
You get the most out of musicians when they have to answer in the moment. There’s something lazy about, “Let’s fix it later. Let’s get 10 takes.” I’ve done it, but there’s something essential in capturing a moment. Recording music is capturing something that has never been and will never be again.
That’s why I’m excited to hear these songs live. The record is beautiful on its own, but with live playing— it's exciting to see how songs like these can expand. When you play, you create something that’s never existed and never will again.
Yeah. It’s the mirror image of the record. Things are different live. This is my fullest record — strings, keys — and there’s the challenge of translating it. My first record was easier because the live version was basically the same.
There’s an alchemist’s craft in making a big moment with three or four people. You make a very small moment first, instead of triggering a lot of stuff. That’s how I see it. Touring becomes part of the ecosystem — how do you make a show out of a record? Usually, when I record these songs, I don’t know how to play them very well yet. They’re soft and insecure. There’s something important there — people can relate to it. Is this thing going to crumble before it gets to the end, or will it hold? People might not articulate it, but they feel it. You sort of cheer with the track.
And by the time you play it 20 times on the road, the song may become something you never expected,
Exactly. Touring is intense. You have small gaps to tweak things — sometimes at soundcheck you try something once and it turns into a whole new section. That’s exciting.
What's something non-Brazilians consistently misunderstand about Brazilian culture?
Oh man, that’s on the spot. It’s hard to get the full perspective of a culture, and I know most people engage with love and admiration. I don’t want to sit with a blackboard saying what’s right or wrong. But one funny thing is how Tropicália became a “genre.”
I’m usually placed as a Tropicália artist. That’s odd in a Brazilian context. Tropicália was an art movement — very localized in time — maybe a year and a half, two years, a handful of records and artists, who later didn’t even follow those ideas.
It had a manifesto, a set of approaches to culture, to pop, to the industrialized West. In a first reading, using electric guitars was seen as sell-out, Americanized. But they did a beautiful dribble — like, “Look, this is just a guitar. What you make of it is in the hands of the guitarist.” And they made colorful, bold music.
That’s how it’s seen within Brazilian music. But I speak about all this lightly — people are talking about music, which is positive and communal. There are worse things to be mistaken about.
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