Songwriters From Italy

"Interviewer: What value do utopia and dreams have for you? De André: I think that a man without utopia, without dreams, without ideals, that is to say without passions and without enthusiasm, would be a monstrous animal made simply of instinct and reason, a kind of wild boar with a degree in pure mathematics."

"Interviewer: Does money attract you, Mr De André? De André: Yes, it is I who have never managed to attract it."

"History is written by the victors."

"No history of peace has ever been written."

"Genoa. What does it mean to me? I was lucky enough to be born into this ethnic group, in this small world where a different language is spoken, which was part of a much larger state but with its own language, cuisine and culture. This makes you feel so close to these people who share your diversity, you feel different from the rest of the world, you are a member of a large family of seven hundred thousand people who have their own customs and traditions. And if you arrive in Milan, you arrive as an immigrant from the South. (pp. 8-9)"

"[...] Genoa is also the scent and flavour of its cuisine. Like those of pesto, which Dori and I make in Milan or Gallura, putting lots of walnuts in it so that it doesn't taste of mint: as happens when you make pesto far from Genoa. Because only basil from Genoa “doesn't taste of it”. (p. 10)"

"Why do I write? Out of fear. For fear that the memory of the lives of the people I write about will be lost. For fear that the memory of me will be lost. Or even just to be protected by a story, to slip into a story and no longer be recognisable, controllable, blackmailable."

"Music is not symbolic. Music represents itself. It is a protomental phenomenon, it anticipates reason. It evokes, but not symbolically."

"Where does the nostalgia we all feel for Genoa come from? You say, and you are right, that our musical tradition is full of emigrants who miss their city and dream of returning to it, which is also found in Neapolitan songs and those of other seaside cities, while this is not the case in Milan or Turin. But perhaps this is because the Milanese were born rich and do business on the mainland, while the Genoese were born poor and had to trade by sea, far from home. (p. 9)"

"The heart of the sailor is always dry, warming itself around the fire. The sailor does not love the sea: he works on it and fears it. He dreams of always having the earth under his feet, remembering the aromas, faces and flavours of home."

"Benedetto Croce said that everyone writes poetry until the age of eighteen. From the age of eighteen onwards, two categories of people continue to write poetry: poets and idiots. So, as a precaution, I would prefer to consider myself a singer-songwriter."

"There are those who are touched by faith and those who merely cultivate the virtue of hope [...], the God in whom, despite everything, I continue to hope, is an entity above the parties, above the factions."

"Do they complain about gypsies? Look at them going around begging for votes: but they don't go on foot, they have buses that look like spaceships, trains, aeroplanes: and look at them when they stop for lunch or dinner: they know how to eat with a knife and fork, and with a knife and fork they will eat your savings. Italy belongs to a hundred men, but are we sure that these hundred men belong to Italy?"

"Singing alone with my guitar would give me the same feeling as getting down on all fours in the De Ferrari fountain at midday."

"Genoa is also the friends who live far away and watch you grow up and grow old, for example the pescuèi who, just like in Il pescatore, have faces furrowed with wrinkles that look like smiles, and whatever you confide in them, they already know from the sea."

"During the war, I was displaced to Piedmont, and for me, Genoa was a myth, something extraordinary. When I saw it for the first time at the age of five, I immediately fell in love with it, tremendously, and at the first match of my life, Genoa-Sampierdarenese, I immediately married the team that bore the name of my city. It was a love that I never betrayed, the most solid of my life, which was full of constant contradictions."

"When I go out in public, I'm very afraid of being criticised. Controlling your facial muscles, for example, which should be an actor's job, is a specific thing, it's a precise skill. Putting my face in front of my songs annoyed me first of all because it seemed to me that my songs remained behind my face, whose muscles I couldn't control, and secondly, the fact that I couldn't control them also worried me. In the sense that I didn't consider myself an actor at all, that is, a person suited to showing his face in a certain way. Maybe I say “you sleep buried in a field of wheat” and I'm laughing, but I don't realise it because I'm not used to acting out what I'm saying. Because I wrote that song, I didn't have to act it out. I'm not capable of acting. I consider myself, in a way, someone who can also make music to accompany lyrics. I consider myself a guitar player. I don't go beyond that. I don't think I'm the ideal interpreter of my songs. Because to be an interpreter, you have to be something different. I don't think I'm an interpreter, because you always have to have the face you had when you wrote the verse. The face you had when you felt it. And it's not like I write verses in front of the mirror. In fact, I don't like myself that much."

"After ten years of slapping each other, you either become friends or you kill each other."

"I tried in every way to be a man. I could have expressed myself, for example, through flower cultivation if I had lived in Albenga, or through cattle breeding if they hadn't secretly sold me a farm that my parents owned in 1954. I happened to become a singer-songwriter. Becoming an artist, in a way, prevents you from becoming a man in the normal way. So I believe that at a certain point in your life, you have to make up for the time you lost being an artist in order to try to become a man."

"For me, Genoa is like a mother, it's where I learned to live."

"What struck me about the world of the carruggi was the habit of suffering and therefore solidarity. They were supportive on any occasion, because they were the underclass, not even a specific class that could be grasped by the traditional political parties. It was a world that defended itself to some extent from the state, and so I wallowed in it. I already had precise political ideas, derived from Brassens, whom I listened to from morning to night, thanks to the records my father brought me from France, and he described this world, these marginalised characters that I then found in Genoa."

"I have no doubt about the total character that the struggle for the independence of Sardinia can take on if we work in a truly revolutionary way. Because the anti-colonial liberation struggle of a people is exemplary for all colonised peoples, indeed for all the exploited peoples of the world... In Nuoro, important work has begun, I believe, because it can have an impact on society... The signs should not be underestimated, because a new reality is emerging today in Sardinia with the need to liberate the masses and give them a national and international voice. Since I cannot help but say that I am against small and large power games, against bottlenecks and delays that are artfully manoeuvred, I am firmly convinced that the Sardinian knot will certainly not be untangled by the simple and imperturbable methods of changing the presidency of the Palace. Much more is needed! It is the people who must change things. Sardinia, with its own language, history and territory, has the right to be recognised as a nation."

"What I think is useful is to have the government as close to me as possible and the state, if it really can't be avoided, as far away from my balls as possible."

"Our world is divided into winners and losers, where the former number three and the latter three billion. How can we be optimistic?"

"I sang imitating Modugno, and besides, how could one not be influenced by him?"

"Genoa is a democratic and liberal city. It is tolerant because it has always done business with everyone regardless of language, customs, clothing or skin colour."

"Genoa [...] has always been this way [multiracial] since the Middle Ages. I would say like Sarajevo. Five centuries ago, no one paid any attention if someone wore a turban. Genoa was born and grew up respecting different religions. There has never been a ghetto. The Church had little power, and neither did the Inquisition. There was never a torture chamber in the Doge's Palace. I don't think it was so much an Enlightenment vocation as the need to open up to everyone for commercial interests. Are the carugi full of Moroccans? This is nothing new for Genoa."

"This is a song that dates back to 1962, where I show that I have always had, both as a young man and as an old man, very few ideas, but on the other hand, they are fixed. In the sense that in this song I express what I have always thought: that there is very little merit in virtue and very little blame in error. Also because, despite my fifty-eight years, I have not yet managed to understand exactly what virtue is and what error is, because we only need to move to a different latitude to see how values become disvalues and vice versa. Not to mention moving through time: there were morals in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance that are no longer recognised today. Today we complain: I see that there is great torment over the loss of values. We need to wait and see how they develop over time. I don't think that young people today have no values; they certainly have values that we have not yet managed to understand properly, because we are too attached to our own."

"Riccardo Mannerini was another great friend of mine. He was almost blind because when he was sailing on a Costa ship, a boiler exploded in his face. He committed suicide many years later, without ever receiving any compensation. He had bad experiences with the law because he was a true libertarian, so when someone wanted by the police knocked on his door, he would hide them in his house. He would even treat their wounds and remove the bullets from their bodies. We wrote Cantico dei Drogati (Song of the Drug Addicts) together, which for me, as someone who was totally addicted to alcohol, had a liberating, cathartic value. However, the text did not scare me; on the contrary, I was pleased with it. It is a common reaction among drug addicts to take pleasure in the fact that they are taking drugs. I took pleasure in drinking, partly because alcohol allowed my imagination to run wild."

"I've never seen a musician communicate with the audience like Luciano does."

"If a miraculous voice had not performed La canzone di Marinella in 1967, I would most likely have finished my law studies and become a solicitor. I thank Mina for stacking the deck in my favour and, above all, to the benefit of my virtual clients."

"Jesus of Nazareth [...] in my opinion, was and remains the greatest revolutionary of all time."

"From a quality of life perspective, apart from the devastating spectacle of the suburban areas, life in Sardinia is perhaps the best a man could wish for: twenty-four thousand kilometres of forests, countryside and coastline surrounded by a miraculous sea should coincide with what I would recommend to the good Lord to give us as Paradise. In my opinion, the Sardinians would make better decisions if they were independent within a European and Mediterranean community."

"For centuries, the people of Genoa have had a special relationship with French culture, both in music, as in the case of the chansonnier, and in cabinetmaking, with the Genoese Baroque style."

"[...] if I am classical high school, he (Francesco De Gregori) is university."

"During my kidnapping, my faith in people helped me, precisely where my faith in God was lacking. I have always said that God is a human invention, something utilitarian, a patch on our fragility... But, nevertheless, something changed during my kidnapping. It's not that I changed my mind, but it's certain that swearing today embarrasses me, to say the least."

"You're not bad [Cristiano De André], you're just stupid!"

"Mannerini taught me that being intelligent doesn't mean accumulating knowledge, but rather selecting it once it has been accumulated, trying to separate the useful from the useless. [...] I practically learned this ability to analyse and observe from him. He also influenced me politically, reinforcing ideas I already had. He was certainly one of the most important figures in my life."

"Genoa is like a mother to me. It is where I learned to live. It gave birth to me and raised me until I was thirty-five years old: and that is no small thing, in fact, it is perhaps almost everything. Today, it seems to me that Genoa has the face of all the poor devils I met in its carruggi, the outcasts I would later find in Sardinia, the “graziose” of Via del Campo."

"What is loyalty, after all? It's nothing more than a big itch with a strict ban on scratching."

"(About the the Sanremo Music Festival If it were still a singing competition, [...] that is, if it were a matter of vocal cords, it could still be considered an almost sporting competition, because vocal cords are still muscles. In my case, I would have to express my feelings, or the technique through which I am able to express them, and I believe that this cannot be a matter of competition."

"Every evening when I finish a concert, I want to turn to the audience and say: “Everything you have heard so far is completely false, just as the ideals and feelings that led me to write these things and sing them are completely true”. But ideals and feelings are used to construct dreamt-up realities. Reality, the real one, is what awaits us outside the theatre doors. And to change it, if we want to change it, we need concrete, real actions."

"I come from Hamburg, I come from Frankfurt, I come from Sardinia, but above all I come from Genoa. Genoa, which every time you find yourself outside, you realise is a city to be missed above all else. In the sense that you are born there and live there until you are twenty – where, as a poet friend of ours said, you burn with unawareness – then at twenty you try to find work and [...] you realise that it is difficult to work there. So you leave. And after you leave, you begin to miss it."

"And then suddenly love burst out everywhere."

"Genoa is beautiful, you realise it is beautiful when you are far away."

"I can't write about Genoa because I'm too involved. I don't write anthem because I don't like marches and because nothing can surpass the chants of the Gradinata Nord. If anything, I would have written a love song for Genoa, but I don't do it because to write songs you need to maintain a certain detachment from what you write, whereas Genoa involves me too much."

"Dear Andrea, I am your friend because you are the only priest who does not want to send me to heaven by force."

"(About Paolo Villaggio) I met him for the first time in Pocol, above Cortina; I was an angry kid who swore a lot; he liked me because I was tormented and restless, and he was the same, only he was more controlled, perhaps because he was older than me, so he immediately took on the role of older brother and said to me: “Look, you mustn't swear, you swear to be the centre of attention, you're an arsehole”."

"[Preghiera in gennaio] I dedicated it to Tenco. It was written, or rather conceived, on the way back from Sanremo, where my ex-wife Enrica Rignon, Anna Paoli and I had rushed to. After seeing Luigi lying in that morgue (outside Sanremo, because they didn't want us there) and then returning to Genoa to wait for the funeral, which was to take place two days later in Cassine, I think, this composition came to me."

"Men fall into two categories: those who think and those who let others think."