Caetano Veloso just gets younger

Rock began as the music of youth, especially virile, male youth. This has presented a problem for aging rockers, whose macho rebel personas often seem to become increasingly irrelevant and ridiculous with the passage of time.

So it is funny and charming to find Caetano Veloso confronting this subject directly on his most rocking album in more than two decades: “I’m not jealous of maternity, or of lactation,” the 65-year-old Brazilian pop star sings in “Homem” (Man), a wry exploration of gender differences. “I only envy longevity, and multiple orgasms.”

Speaking in precise English from a tour stop in Venice, Italy, Veloso elaborates. “I think aging is not an easy subject for anybody. You do not need to be a rock ‘n’ roll singer or performer to be concerned with this. But, of course, singers and performers have that aspect of life intensified by their profession. And it is true that there are three songs in the current show that directly refer to this subject.”

This year is the 40th anniversary of Veloso’s recording debut as co-founder (with Gilberto Gil and others) of the Brazilian movement dubbed tropicalismo. Inspired by the Beatles and Bob Dylan, the tropicalistas merged rock with modernist art, theater, poetry and local pop styles. Though in retrospect their work seems charming and rather innocent, Brazil’s dictatorial government viewed all counter-cultural expressions as threats to the state, and Veloso and Gil were jailed and sent into exile -- an exile made somewhat less bitter by being spent in swinging London.

Since then, Veloso possibly has had the most varied career of any ‘60s icon.

Along with more than two-dozen albums of his own songs, film appearances and a recent autobiography, he has released Spanish-language discs and, in 2004, “A Foreign Sound,” a lushly orchestrated collection of English-language pop standards.

His latest album, “Ce,” is a drastic about-face from that project. A stripped-down electric session, it features a quartet of players at least 20 years his junior. The same group will accompany him at his Southland tour stop Wednesday at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium.

The cliche regarding such style-shifting is to say that a performer is constantly reinventing himself. Veloso insists that all the styles were part of his work from the start: “I wouldn’t even say this record is so much more of a rock thing,” he says. “It’s true that it was made with just one band, and with a particular sound of its own. But in every record since 1967 I have rock elements, and around my whole thing there is always this phantom of rock ‘n’ roll.”

At the same time, he notes that the Brazilian take on rock has always been unique. “Most Latin singers who do rock ‘n’ roll, either they speak Spanish, Italian or French, and they try to make what Bruce Springsteen makes with his throat, kind of ‘aargh.’ ”

Veloso makes a harsh, guttural noise. “That’s a Latin person trying to sound like a white Anglo-Saxon who’s trying to sound like a black American. And fortunately in Brazil this didn’t happen, none of the vocalists have this vice.”

Veloso, in particular, tends to sound gentle and melodious even when singing lyrics that are anything but comforting. When his voice takes on a more strident edge for one new song, the aptly titled “Rocks,” he is quick to note that “it sounds more aggressive, but it’s also a little funny, it’s more comical.”

Indeed, he says the whole idea of a rock band album began as a sort of joke. For the last 10 years he has been working with guitarist Pedro Sa, who is 35, and they mused about doing an anonymous rock project: “We would create a repertoire, invent sounds, and I would hide,” Veloso says. “It would be a secret thing, like those guys in England did, the Gorillaz, and we would do it as an experiment, as if it were a new band.”

Meanwhile, Veloso was planning an album of sambas. But during the “Foreign Sound” tour, he found himself going through a difficult time. “Suddenly I wrote this song ‘Minhas Lagrimas’ [‘My Tears’] out of pure emotional necessity,” he says. “And I thought, we could treat this with a rock ‘n’ roll band. So that made me think of maybe doing this seriously.”

The resulting album was produced by Veloso’s son, Moreno, and aside from Sa, the other players are in their mid-20s. “I felt very comfortable with them,” Veloso says, “because these kids are very close to me, and they are very cultivated in popular music history, Brazilian and otherwise. I have been listening to music with Moreno and Pedro Sa since they were children.”

On “A Foreign Sound,” Veloso was singing the music of artists who were old men in his youth, so in a way that album and this one have allowed him to confront his own maturity from opposite directions. “I wouldn’t say this was conscious beforehand,” he says. “But I became aware of those meanings as it was happening.

“I was a child when I heard those older songs, and now I am singing songs about aging, on a stage where I am side by side with kids who are 26 or 35,” he says. “So these things, in the end, have become a sort of theme.”

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Caetano Veloso

Where: Pasadena Civic, 300 E. Green St., Pasadena

When: Wed., 8 p.m.

Price: $36.25 to $86

Contact: (626) 449-7360