Gilberto Gil on the inside: illness turned into poetry

The year of 2016 was one of the hardest in Gilberto Gil’s life. On February 25th, he was hospitalized for the first time at the Sírio-Libanês Hospital, in São Paulo, to have chronical kidney disease treated. Straight away, he had to go under a heart biopsy.

After this first, there have been several hospitalizations, both for getting treatment and for having check-ups. Like with everything else in his life, the singer and songwriter has turned hardship into poetry. On the inside, Gilberto Gil was not the same anymore.

That became clear in the first album of never before recorded songs after that, OK OK OK (2018), recorded shortly after. For the album, Gil composed two songs to honor the medical team who had treated him.

Cardiologista de mão cheia / First-rate cardiologist
Pega artéria, solta veia / Grabs an artery, releases a vein
Volta e meia faz o morto ficar são / Now and then makes the dead heal


“Kalil” is the song composed by Gil: an honor to Roberto Kalil Filho, the cardiologist who led, along with nephrologist Paulo Cesar Ayroza Galvão, the team who treated him.

A member of doctors Kalil and Ayrosa Galvão’s team, cardiologist Roberta Saretta has inspired a song in which Gil goes over the intervention his heart went under:

Ela mandou arrancar quatro pedacinhos do meu coração / She had four little pieces of my heart pulled out
Depois mandou examinar os quatro pedacinhos / Then she had the four little pieces tested
Um para saber se eu sinto medo / One to know whether I feel afraid
Um para saber se eu sinto dor / One to know whether I feel pain
Um para saber os meus segredos / One to get to know my secrets
Um para saber se eu sinto amor / One to know whether I fell love

The OK OK OK album showed lyrics based on Gilberto Gil’s thoughts on family, politics, and, most of all, the burden of age and illnesses suffered in the recent years. There were months of suffering due to going back and forth to the hospital.

Medical treating was long and, after being discharged, the artist had to change his routine a little, as well as the way he dealt with his body. Just like with anything else in his life, Gil took the changes light-heartedly.

“There have been almost two, three years of treatment, which have left a drug legacy, so to speak (laughs). I have my permanent and daily dialogue with some drugs. I have adjusted fairly easy, maybe because of my domestic legacy…

“… I spent the first years of my childhood between my house and my father’s practice, he was a doctor and set up his clinic in a room within the house where we lived, in Ituaçu (Bahia)…

“… I have seen my father give the first shot of penicillin, the first antibiotic to arrive in town, around 1950; so, I have a familiarity with this world of medicine, the processes, the procedures. I have never been scared by medicine (laughs).”

During the year Gilberto Gil went under treatment, fans would get very concerned about the singer and songwriter. They also were very curious about which adjustments he would have to perform in order to make his life fit this new reality presented by his body.

After all, what was wrong? How would he react to so many drugs? What is going to change in his life? Would Gil still keep his macrobiotics diet? One of the biggest changes caused by the chronical kidney disease treatment was in his taste buds:

“I had to have a certain type of chemotherapy, especially for the kidneys. The drugs were causing strong changes to my taste buds. I used to hate sparkling water and, after chemotherapy, sparkling water is all I drink…

“… Of course, when there is no sparkling water, I go for spring water. Yet, if there were a single bottle available, no matter where I was, I would prefer it, due to its taste. I got used to the new taste, this astringent thing of the sparkling water.”

As for the macrobiotics diet, well, he had been skipping it even before knowing he was ill. Gil’s first contact with macrobiotics diet was an article featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

The former Beatle and his wife claimed to have adhered to the diet based on whole grains and vegetables, which values steamed food. The incarceration, along with Caetano Veloso, in 1968, during the military dictatorship, reinforced his wish to lightened what he ingested at every meal.

Caetano would ask “the boys servicing the cell” to lessen salt and animal protein and focus on grains, such as beans. Once he was released, Gil kept the diet and adopted yoga practices. However, he has never been too strict to himself or a radical.

Even before suffering from chronical kidney disease, he started varying his eating habits: “After a seven-year period of vegetarianism, even stricter on the macrobiotics-era, I started eating meat again.”

The change got Gil into a tight sport during one of his appointments with Tomio Kikuchi. A benchmark in macrobiotics in Latin American, the nippo-Brazilian owned Satori, a busy restaurant-office in the Liberdade neighborhood, in São Paulo.

“I got there for an appointment and he told me, ‘You know, someone turned you in. Someone wrote me saying you were seen eating pork’ (laughs). To which I replied, ‘Yeah, I did it, professor.’ I love pork. It is the animal protein I like the most,” confesses Gil.

From that point on, he decided to be flexible. “I have a very open diet. I kept habits I got from macrobiotics, such as brown rice and vegetables such as burdock, a sort of special carrot. But nowadays I have more of an omnivorous thing. I eat everything.”