I often come across new music through my friends who send me track lists and mix CDs, but last year I came across Zoe’s Radio, which is absolutely fabulous. Zoe is 15 now and she’s been doing the show in different forms since she was 13 – what great taste in music! Her dad produces the show with her and this totally takes me back in time.

When I was 8 (or younger) until I was, maybe, 12, my dad and I would record tapes together. It was so much fun. It was mostly just talk, but sometimes he’d play some guitar or I’d play some guitar. I loved when he interviewed me and we pretended we were other people. I had totally forgotten about this until I was listening to Zoe’s show today. Sometimes we had accents. Sometimes we invented a new language and spoke in it for a whole afternoon, contributing much to my grandmother’s hysterical laughter.

I remember hacking sound equipment with him at a very early age to improve our production quality. Splitting microphones and taping them to the insides of his old guitar, or connecting a mile of electric chord so we could put the large speakers in the backyard and record in the sun.

Sometimes we’d sing opera off-key for hours. To this day the Barber of Seville is my favourite piece. I have my dad’s original vynil as a souvenir of those times, though now I listen to a 3-CD full version with every recitativo . I still know the words to the dialogues we’d sing together and I just realized that whenever we meet he will say a line from it and I’ll respond. We’ll go about our conversation like nothing happened.

When I moved to the US one of the first things I did was to buy a guitar. And a second shortly after. Before I left Sao Paulo I gave mine to my dad; his original guitar had finally succumbed after decades of enduring a caseless life. I hope he still plays. We play exactly the same way – we never studied guitar and we play by ear – but we play the exact same way because we play the exact same songs. That’s really how I learned, by immitating him.

I just loved watching him play – he was never very good, but he totally put on a show, specially when playing more traditional flamenco style. He could have fooled anyone with the posture and gesture. We’d sometimes play Paco de Lucia on the stereo and he’d pretend he was playing. There was this one song with a long pattern that went on and on for almost 20 minutes that I’d spin to. I’d spin and spin and spin until I was too dizzy to continue. I’d stop and sit down looking groggy and we’d burst into laughter.

I gotta find those tapes next time I go home visit him.