W/Brasil (Chama o Síndico)

W/Brasil was the São Paulo advertising agency of Ben's friend Washington Olivetto. In Olivetto's telling, Ben played a show for the agency's staff around the turn of the 1990s and improvised a chant on its name between songs. At dinner afterwards they talked about the chaos of the Collor years, and Olivetto joked that if Brazil were an apartment building, the síndico, the building manager, would be Tim Maia. Ben replied that Tim Maia really had once wanted to run his building in Barra da Tijuca. The chorus calls for the síndico; the verses are a crowded, comic roll call of a country in disorder.

Sources date it to 1990 as a single, but the earliest release on record is the live double album Ao Vivo no Rio, and it became a dance-floor hit in Brazil and, according to Qobuz, in Europe as well in the early 1990s. Greg Caz calls it his last major Brazilian hit single. A club version followed in 1995 and an acoustic one on Acústico MTV in 2002, and it remains a fixed point of his shows. Olivetto died in October 2024.