Estrelar

Estrelar opens the Som Livre album Marcos Valle. Its groove joins the syncopation of baião, a Brazilian rhythm, to American funk. Valle played Rhodes and arranged the rhythm section and choir, Lincoln Olivetti played Yamaha electric piano and arranged the horns and choir, Robson Jorge played guitar, Fernando Souza bass, Picolé drums and Serginho do Trombone Moog. Billboard Brasil counts the bass and Moog breakdown among the most memorable in Brazilian dance music.

The words nearly did not happen. Max Pierre of Som Livre gave Valle three days to find a lyric or lose the song, so he, his brother Paulo Sérgio and Olivetti played the track loud until a theme of energy, exercise, health and summer arrived. The title means roughly to shine like a star. Valle called it a happy song, something for summer, and Som Livre sold it as workout music, issuing it as a single in late 1982 with Fogo do Sol on the B-side and following it with a video of aerobics on the beach.

The summer hit

It played everywhere on Copacabana, and Valle remembers the gyms playing it too, just as Brazil's gyms were booming. He said he became a kind of sex symbol, and that people even offered to put up money for him to open a gym. It sold about 90,000 copies. In 2023 Billboard Brasil called it a hedonistic boogie anthem of the health generation, and Valle has said it may matter more than Samba de Verão. That year it spread again on TikTok in sped-up and slowed edits.

Live and later

It is the song he plays most often in the shows logged on setlist.fm, first at Glastonbury in 2015 and still in 2026. A live version with +2 (Moreno, Domenico and Kassin) is on Conecta: Ao Vivo no Cinematheque (2008), and it is on the DVD Homenagem a Marcos Valle (2011). Valle recorded it again with Gilles Peterson's Sonzeira in 2014, Jazztronik covered it the same year, and Peki Momés made a Turkish version, Yıldız (Estrelar), in 2025. Both uploads in the hypersongs web are the same album recording.