"Pais e Filhos" is a song composted by Renato Russo, in partnership with Marcelo Bonfá and Dado Villa-Lobos in 1989 and released by his band, Legião Urbana, on the 1989 album As Quatro Estações.
Composition "Pais e Filhos" was created, according to producer Mayrton Bahia, with several layers of guitar and ‘leftover’ sounds, as if there were several songs within one. To resolve the issue, he went back to cutting and pasting pieces of tape with stickers. The lyrics of the song deal with parent-child relationships and suicide.
In 1994, during the band's appearance on SBT's Programa Livre programme, Renato let out a sigh of relief when he saw the audience's joyful reaction to the announcement that they would be playing it:
"Listen, you know this song is about suicide, right? (...) It's about a girl who has problems with her parents, she threw herself out of a fifth-floor window and there is no tomorrow. (...) It's a very serious song, like ‘Índios’. (...) I couldn't bear to listen to it twice in a row. (...) Sometimes these songs reflect a moment in my life that I don't like to remember anymore."
Legacy According to ECAD, the song is one of the band's most played and also one of the most re-recorded.
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