The year is 2006, and pop culture is in a state of uncontrolled combustion. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest dominates the box office. Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” is inescapable. High School Musical erupts into a kind of adolescent Beatlemania, another timeless phenomenon.
In the midst of all that, imagine yourself as a twelve-year-old boy.
The music video for Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” on MTV is about to vanish, replaced by Disney Channel programming — Hannah Montana, followed by The Suite Life of Zack & Cody. The afternoon has been spent rollerblading through the streets and completing missions in The Simpsons: Hit & Run on PlayStation. Sitcoms will close the day. Life is good, by all available metrics.
But while preparing a bowl of cereal, you have your perfect moment of the day interrupted by the sound of “Moonlit Haze”, the ringtone of your Motorola Razr V3. A school friend, breathless, tells you to log onto Orkut and look up a page titled “The Boy Who Defeated the Devil and Became Bigger Than God”. You don’t. Your crush on Emily Osment feels more urgent.
By the next morning, walking through the school corridors, you learn that attention — the same attention once reserved for fictional characters and pop idols — can, in fact, be directed at you. Only a year earlier, your closest brush with this world was playing Icarus in a school play. The feeling of sudden popularity, however, is suffocating. People you’ve never met are talking about you, curious to see what your next step will be. Sometimes literally because they even follow you home.
Now, also imagine that a month later, attending the premiere of that blockbuster pirate movie, you are forced to turn off your phone because there are still many people interested in you. And even with your cell phone off, you can’t enjoy the movie because you’re worried about what awaits you outside. When you finally check your call history, there are two and a half hours of missed calls, the exact running time of Dead Man’s Chest. Dozens of numbers. Nothing stops them from calling your name.
At the end of the day, the most-played song on your MP3 player confirms that you really had a “bad day”. And that “mania” only then contemplated by you as a distant karma of the over-exposed gets closer. You are the cult now.
That’s a scenario that would please the ego of most people, but as an introvert, notoriety, even on a small scale, is unbearable.
Saulo Oliveira S. doesn’t have to imagine any such circumstance.
On June 6, 2006, while waiting for the school bus with friends, a sinister man approached the boy and challenged him to a harmonica duel. Saulo is said to have won after a rendition of Ennio Morricone’s “Man With a Harmonica”. The man — who identified himself as the devil — handed over his harmonica, named the Elder Harmonica, and disappeared, leaving the boy with his soul intact.
Saulo’s friends, without his knowledge, documented the event online under the now-infamous title. Overnight, he became a mythological figure among prepubescent millennials — a war hero in a digital folklore he never asked to inhabit.
There are fragments from that period that resist easy synthesis: an afternoon spent avoiding notice, the sense of being observed without quite understanding why, the gradual recognition that something intangible had shifted. What began as an isolated moment became, through repetition and attention, a kind of early mythology.
In fact, while what followed is difficult to verify in any conventional sense, at least according to Marina May, one of those present that day who was waiting for the same Trans Isaak bus, the man bowed and handed over the Elder Harmonica to Oliveira. She recalls, by FaceTime, the immediate consequences of the story’s popularity. “Within a small but active digital ecosystem, the story began to circulate, not as fact exactly, but as something closer to folklore: embellished, repeated, and gradually detached from its original context”, says May.
For Oliveira, the consequences were less abstract. Attention gathered quickly and, by his account, with persistence that felt disproportionate to the event itself. Classmates speculated, strangers grew curious, and the distance between the person and the story began to narrow in uncomfortable ways. At a certain point, the narrative no longer belonged entirely to those who had created it, nor to the one at its center.
One of the most defining moments of burnout came when Saulo isolated himself at the top of a lighthouse after classmates claimed they had discovered where he lived and were coming to seize the Elder Harmonica by force. The day ended with a police car, his mother arriving to give him a ride home, and a carefully executed plan to get rid of them. He was not found that day.
The story has circulated for years in varying forms, gaining detail in the telling. Time diluted the obsession. Saulo helped it along. He never played the harmonica again. Never spoke of the story — not even to family, until now deciding to let go of the past.
Cut to 2025.
In his apartment, Saulo puts the kettle on as he recounts this moment. He sits with a cup of tea in front of the television, hoping that the familiar cadence of a mid-2000s sitcom might quiet the anxiety of waiting. A car is already on its way to take him to Fashion Week. Nothing escapes Oliveira’s sharp vision and detailed attention.
“I swear I’ve already counted more than ten times Austin Butler walks through the background of these hallway scenes,” he says, rewatching Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide. “There he goes again — grey shirt over dark blue, red backpack.” He’s right. Butler appears endlessly, looping through the set like a reused animation cell.
“It’s almost a Hanna-Barbera trick,” Saulo reflects. “When television embraces a Fordist delivery system, these shortcuts become inevitable. But it’s also fascinating. No one on that set could’ve predicted that the extra in the background would one day be the only Oscar-nominated actor among them — playing Elvis, of all people.”
The car arrives, and Saulo prepares to get off. The model heads to watch the Boqueirão Fashion Week, a fashion show marked by precision, spectacle, and quiet triumph. For the industry, it’s a successful night. For Saulo, it’s something else entirely.
Among his friendly models, a bottle of champagne pops, and there’s foam rising like a small volcanic eruption in the air. The gesture feels ceremonial. Saulo Oliveira seems comfortable and willing to strengthen his ties with the couture segment. His bid to fashion mirrors a deeper reemergence — a reconnection with music and with an audience he stepped away from for over five years.
And suddenly, it’s 2006 again.
October. A library corridor. Saulo pulls a book from the shelf: William Shakespeare and His Dramatic Acts by Andrew Donkin. The illustration draws him in. Inside, he encounters a portrait of one of history’s most formidable narrative minds.
There is no turning back.
That moment plants an obsession with writing, structure, and storytelling — with achieving a level of excellence that feels both necessary and unreachable. Teachers would later read his texts aloud as examples. His stories and essays would be published. And still, the feeling persisted: the closer he reached, the further perfection seemed to retreat.
“Trying to achieve the ideal result is treacherous,” Saulo says. “You move toward the horizon, but the horizon line is a fiction. The more you stretch your arms, the further it gets — like Gatsby’s green light. If I never reach perfection, I’m incomplete. If I reach it, the purpose ends, and so do I.”
It’s a theory tinged with echoes of Wildean tragedy — the artist condemned by his own standards. But perhaps there’s another path already unfolding. Perhaps Saulo crossed the horizon long ago; his vision deliberately obscured by unseen forces to preserve the very essence that drives him forward.
Unaware, he continues to move through time and seasons, creating works like Renewing Rock N Roll and Monolith, and now shaping the conceptual architecture of his forthcoming album — a project born of silence, absence, and narrative control. An album that rejects spectacle in favour of internal coherence. That understands restraint as power.
If Do Gears Know They Are Gears? asks anything of its listener, it’s this: to consider whether meaning lies in motion or awareness — whether becoming is more important than arrival.
From 2006 to 2016, the trajectory was introspective and necessary to the personality that was formed. On the way to becoming simply Saulo Oliveira S. (born July 14, 1993, Saulo-Sykes de Oliveira da Silva), in 2013, he had the opportunity to direct a short documentary, “Ethics, Politics and Citizenship”, for which he also composed the score.
While walking through the mall in 2015, he received an invitation from a talent scout to be a model. The preternaturally thoughtful guy quietly demurred. The expression in his sultry-cinematic face blurred in reluctance. Weeks after the proposal was well clarified, a saga began that would run parallel to his history, bordering on and, at the same time, defining his reality and the aesthetic angle through which he sees the world.
Between magazine photo shoots promoting his independent music, after starting his label British Rock Records in 2016, the next year brought more conceptual and fashion photo shoots. 2017 was a year in which a singular week, in particular, could yield a very interesting chapter in Oliveira’s odyssey.
Believing that it would be a good idea to release his first musical material, a garage band quality EP that no longer exists on the platforms because Saulo, years later, considered that it was not a good result, in August of that year, Oliveira shook hands with a local radio owner. Thus, for a week, he should appear on the online show “Rock Time,” giving opinions on the alternative rock scene, offering tips on bands, and, finally, co-presenting the show while promoting his own music.
But what at first sounded like an excellent strategy to copy from Harry Styles who followed the same path on BBC Radio 1 months before when releasing his work, broke out as an episode in which Oliveira had to exercise a characteristic that he recognizes that he needs to develop better, which is to work as a team without sacrificing his own vision of what he considers ideal.
“For me, it is very logical that a program called ‘Rock Time’ should play songs of this genre exclusively. However, on the first day, when I got there, reggae was playing, so I said I would choose the playlist from Tuesday to Friday or else I would not participate in the show. Then a tension of egos began because Luiz Carlos Affornalli was a war veteran, and he was the host and picked the playlist I was criticising, while I was the drunk boy who knew the owner of the radio and also knew more about the behind-the-scenes history of Rock N Roll than anyone in the world. But we reached a consensus, not without some friction, until that long week was over. It’s challenging to be next to people with a distorted view of things. Even art. For me, it’s very simple: art is what I say it is. If I say it’s not art, the thing loses its importance. The subjectivity of your perception should also have space and be taken into account ”, Oliveira explains.
He was somewhat right. Precisely because he suggested changes in the format during the week in which he was on the extinct Radio Tv Paraná, he heard from the South America’s local radio mogul businessman himself that new sponsors were looking for him to publicize during the Rock Time schedule and the audience for which the show was broadcast live on the platforms had tripled on Wednesday and Thursday with the presence of Oliveira.
If it was because of the fight with Affornalli in which both disagreed about who was the best guitarist in the world, or because of Oliveira’s strong political opinion who, when censored by the presenter turned on the microphone twice to finish what he was saying, or because of Saulo’s captivating way of telling the story about the motivation of Eric Clapton or David Bowie for certain songs, the truth was that the answer to the good results pointed to a single person and, to the bad luck of Affornalli who heard behind the door his position being offered to the novice guy, it was someone who defended the supremacy of British Rock.
Oliveira, however, could not accept any proposal to stop being a mere guest and take the lead in hosting the show, whether on the radio or in a podcast. Instead, he stepped out of that week with a simple idea in mind: for the cover of his next musical project, he would cross the road with a guitar in his hands and think of a pose, impromptu, when he arrived on the other side.
The idea was executed months later, giving rise to what a few critics came to consider something like a zeitgeist-catalysing picture in modern Rock and Roll history, a picture that can also be described, in a less art-passionate view, as an image that continued to resurface, often outlasting the work it was meant to accompany. Over time, it has come to occupy a particular place within his body of work, less as a defining statement than as an early instance of a sensibility still taking shape.
With the iPad in his hands, Saulo’s brother went out to the front of the townhouse with the rocker, and they started the photoshoot. The metadata in the timeless photo in which Oliveira rests one foot lightly on the guitar, his hand lifted in a gesture that hovers between irony and conviction, leaves no doubt. At 16:29:33 on November 15, 2017, the striking photo was taken.
The composition is imperfect in the way certain images tend to be when they outlast their moment—slightly off-balance, attentive to mood rather than symmetry. It carries traces of several visual languages at once: a suggestion of grunge, something theatrical, something self-aware. It was not used in the musical project of the time, but it is immortalised on the single’s cover, which tells the journey of Mack Macneil.
And the picture wasn’t used in any musical project at that time because Saulo backed away from doing music, intending to complete the Law course he had started in the middle of that decade, an academic immersion that he describes as a period of intellectual pilgrimage and contact with the most diverse cultures and art forms.
“My early days of pilgrimage in the world of rock n roll can be described as the same as in the movie Sing Street. Actually, that’s pretty much my experience, as long as you adapt some specificities. My motivation to delve into rock was not exactly a girl, but the need to get out of melancholy and boredom in 2017. I started composing back then, just like the protagonist, based on early experiences and thoughts. I ended up hanging out with local bands and visiting a guy who needed me to constantly download curated rock music for him, which enriched my repertoire—so many things. I had a partner too, just like Conor in the movie. We did write a few electronic songs together that haven’t seen the light of day till now. And then I ended up doing it all by myself, as a single act. I embarked on this as a form of therapy—basically, a regular coming-of-age tale. I also came from a Jesuit and Catholic education background, just like the character, which might have been another motivation to indulge the rules of the orthodox by embracing an unapologetic rock attitude”.
True. It is interesting to note the organicity with which Oliveira’s connection to the academic world and institutions of remarkable structural rigour found a place in his path.
Oliveira has a degree in Law from the Pontifical Catholic University of Paraná and a minor in Arts and Design from Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences, in which the study focused on Beethoven’s 9th Symphony and the 19th-century orchestra. And when his recent album was released, the following week, a literary historian dissected its theme in an academic article published at the University of British Columbia, exploring the work’s literary aspects.
And it is from these connections with the academic world that the energy that makes up his dark academy aesthetic emanates, in apparent paradox with the insurgency and lack of discipline of the rock world. In fact, while studying he left the music aside for a while and even came to consider that the fact of finding a 50 bill on the stadium floor at the entrance to Paul McCartney’s “Freshen Up” concert in 2019 was a good omen, it was a possible interpretation that music and money were in his way and that he should go back to composing and dedicating himself to it.
But he is skeptical and discarded the probable sign. It was only later, when he was now at Roger Waters’ concert, that he saw the huge inflated sheep coming towards him, that he remembered a material for an album that he had already left written for a long time and that could be resumed.
While the guitar solo echoed in the stadium, Saulo remembered: “Hey, I also had some consideration about the metaphor of a sheep’s behaviour. What was really my phrase on that occasion? Where is what I wrote?” So, he got home and found a draft of something with the chorus “Are you awake indeed, or just dreaming of electric sheep?” It was only then that he knew he was going to have to continue that.
When he finished his studies, like a good pirate, he already had his eyes on the horizon. Everything that happened had its due relevance, culminating in a version of Saulo Oliveira who, in 2020, after releasing the album Wild Horizon, would embark on an ambitious journey to create the next best alternative album. This new goal meant that other subjects that previously attracted Oliveira’s attention should be put aside. Even those he considered important flags for a long time.
Since he was young, and for many years thereafter, Oliveira’s life was marked by remarkable activism, engaging in humanitarian causes and the defense of social justice. A few episodes stand out from this phase. There’s that one in which, using his influence, he got, in a few hours, thousands of signatures in a petition that endorsed the expulsion of a participant in the Brazilian reality show Big Brother for more than just derogatory statements. The sobriety and immediate impact of Oliveira’s attitude reached reverberation in the local media, projecting his anti-racism campaign.
Another undeniable political bias is inferred from the meaning present in a sentence in one of his songs, “Free the working class hero man, give him the Nobel”, which is very obvious if considered who was imprisoned prevented from disputing the elections and competing for the aforementioned award, in the context in which Saulo conceived “What Governs Behind Them + Kool Kids Klub”. During the pandemic, he also avidly protested against the fires in the Amazon rainforest, becoming one of the few voices in a movement calling on world brands to defund the then-government that encouraged the exploitation of the biome.
Perhaps all that impetus to seek a better world has vanished precisely because the other object that disputes Oliveira’s attention in competition with all other interests in the world has won: to dedicate himself to something that encapsulates the excellence he seeks. Apparently, it is possible to spend years intoxicated in one’s own thoughts of idealisation about one project or another, until one’s own journey comes to stand out in the interest of collective well-being. The priority becomes one’s own existence and one’s creations. And it’s so subtle that it’s possible not to see it coming. At least that’s what he admits.
“I realised that there are people with a profile more aligned with the same ideologies I have and who can protest for the necessary causes with more effectiveness and practical results than I do. So, I probably realized that I should pay attention to other things while activism could gradually fade away. But this was a reflection and conclusion that happened unconsciously, little by little, when I realised I was already immersed in other goals and that there was no need to express myself about what was happening in society. But I’ve always liked protest songs. Bruce Springsteen’s Ghost of Tom Joad, for instance. The idea that Bob Dylan’s “Hurricane” may have been decisive in the boxer’s release campaign. Things change, our interests change. And maybe I’m also getting closer and closer to a place of privileges that distances the tone of nonconformism from any credibility. I’m not in a position to lecture the world about anything. At the end of the day, it is obvious that I do not believe that injustices and atrocities should prevail, I still hope for the day when the last shall be first, and the first shall be last”, says the rocker.
In a way, it seems he is advancing ever more towards a universe increasingly distant from the earthly world, where constant conflicts and difficulties occur.
A great example is this scene from December 2025.
Saulo pulls in front of a modelling agency house. It’s the renowned Armazém Models, with which he is signed. It looks like a small mansion. There is a small lawn with a decorated garden at the entrance, with three lamps stuck in the ground, next to a tree, and, next to a wall, its surroundings protected by large, round, smooth stones. There are two floors, and through a window at floor height in the left corner of the facade, you can see a sofa in the waiting hall inside.
Saulo goes through a large wooden door with diagonal slats standing out as a strong visual anchor—solid, formal, and slightly austere. Framed photographs are mounted high on the wall, small and formal, presented more as markers of identity or memory than as decorative focal points. The ceiling features recessed sections and rectangular light panels, reinforcing a functional, institutional clarity.
Seating is arranged in a waiting-room configuration. A low, solid wood coffee table—cut from a single slab—adds a natural, grounding element. On it sits a glass water jug and disposable cups, reinforcing the sense of hospitality that is practical rather than personal. Natural light enters through large windows softened by sheer curtains, diffusing brightness without dramatising it.
A large potted plant near the window introduces organic movement and colour. Its healthy leaves contrast with the otherwise controlled geometry of the room.
Saulo crosses the entrance hall, going up the two sloping steps of the room and follows a corridor passing in parallel through the edition island of the booker table and, after passing a room with armchairs and fancy furniture that anticipates the final destination, finally reaches the open area with pool and festive decoration. The scene seems taken from a photograph by Slim Aarons.
The occasion is simple, it’s time to celebrate with fellow model friends the achievements of the year and hope the next year brings more interesting projects. The pool party is full of life and youth, but Oliveira doesn’t jump into the pool. He spends most of the time talking with other models, and he doesn’t drink. In eight days, the year would be over, and that’s the fourth party of a series of six he went through in December 2025.
Someone asks if he remembered to keep the posture and some of the poses they learned in the recent modelling workshop. The question looms large in Oliveira’s mind, and he’s giving himself until Christmas to decide. The correct posture already happens naturally and automatically most of the time.
“In this business, we hear so much about the importance of always having a good image and how posture and poses are necessary in this process that sometimes I forget that probably my most emblematic pose of the last decade is the one that was on the cover of the single Renewing Rock N Roll. That was spontaneous; it was not planned and materialised in a single take. I was like the guitar in my hand, needing a photo for the cover, and then I told my brother I was going to cross the street. When I got to the other side, I would decide on the spot how to pose for the photo. It was like that. It became grunge, kind of cheesy, but also alternative and irreverent. Today, the more I try the poses for a photoshoot, the more I feel I need to improve. And yet, that happened without rehearsal, and today I come to believe that I probably won’t achieve something with that atmosphere again so soon”, Saulo tells us.
Like an alternative to many a Mouseketeer from the now-defunct Mickey Mouse Club, who rose to the spotlight and inspired many of the now-defunct Disney Channel children that eventually defined the pop music in the subsequent decade, even dancing on a wrecking ball, he came from the now-defunct Orkut, from the roots of the internet era. Let’s not forget that it was an online myth that gave birth to this alternative persona.
When the EP Prince of Rock came out in March 2022, Saulo Oliveira was framed as a pop-rock alternative to many names already there —a real, authentic voice in a sea of entertainers and industry pigeonhole performers. It’s more complex than that, of course (Renewing Rock N Roll wasn’t necessarily an indie project), but you get the gist: Saulo played all instruments and wrote his own songs.
Looking back, the EP’s triumph wasn’t just in pushing alt-rock further into the pop space (containing a song that goes far beyond Eminem in the amount of words per time); it’s the way Saulo balanced his vision with the drama and narrative of a conventional singer-songwriter, a blend that has been well improved in his new work.
He emerged not through spectacle but through a sequence of decisions that, in retrospect, reads with the coherence of a persona carefully assembled instead of loudly proclaimed. The aura that surrounds him owes less to self-mythologising than to the cumulative effect of actions that resisted easy explanation.
There is a restraint in how his story unfolds; his path recalls the early chapters of classical figures whose significance became apparent well before their full measure could be taken, which only sharpens the impression of inevitability that now accompanies his name.
However, no one whose mind has become its own god will be able to fly close to the sun with wings made of anything other than wax. Perhaps he can go further than he imagines, provided he abandons the affectation of believing so unquestioningly in the exclusivity of his own vision, almost as a dogma, despite being an atheist.
As a matter of fact, there is a lot of humour, but he is predominantly dry, rigid, distant, diplomatic, polite and evasive. Almost a robot. He lives in a particular world that exists only in his mind and only puts his foot out to take a peek at the real world when he sees the newspaper. It is a world of its own, reluctant to collide with the outside world. They coexist.
Whether he is more a wizard of words, or a model, or a musician, or a rockstar, or the Prince of Rock, as many magazines like to call him, only time will tell. For now, multifaceted is the most realistic and well-rated acknowledgement one could take from Oliveira’s journey.
There’s a lot of potential there. Somehow, he is on the verge of the promise of becoming someone who achieves his goals while navigating the inevitable moment of self-fulfilling prophecy. But potential is not enough.
The only thing that can make something reach a certain level of success is movement. Even a standing stone can get somewhere, but it has to move. If it doesn’t move, it will get stuck in the stagnation of the moss and will never renew itself by rolling to a point of arrival. And obviously, when it comes to Saulo Oliveira, he understands that too, quite well.
“I gotta keep on keeping on”, he says, and then he stops for a second, plunged into an instant thought.
Something in his mind occurred between the sentences, proving his mindset delves into the positive interpretation of an ambiguous ancient proverb, as he concludes, only half-laughing: “A rolling stone gathers no moss”.
Photographed by Chelsea Lindelof
Styled by Tifany Briston
Written by Annie Bush
Hair: Melissa Houston
