Songwriters From Italy

"[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."

"[Speaking about his album Creuza de mä] Sometimes I felt proud, other times disappointed. But in any case, I always felt a little ashamed to find myself almost forced to leaf through specialised magazines, scrutinising with an almost snail-like eye, out of my sockets, what position my latest, so-called, record had achieved in the charts. Because this meant that the record, as an objective consumer product, had taken on greater importance than the songs for which it existed, and in which I sincerely felt I had lived."

"Even today, in some so-called primitive ethnic groups, singing still has the fundamental task of freeing people from suffering, alleviating pain and exorcising evil."

"It was necessary to adapt a language to the sounds produced by these instruments, a language that would glide over them, evoking through sung phonemes, regardless of their immediate comprehensibility, the same atmospheres that the instruments evoked. The most suitable language for us seemed to be Genoese, with its diphthongs, its hiatuses, its wealth of truncated nouns and adjectives that can be shortened or lengthened almost like the cry of a seagull."

"The much-talked-about Genoese school did not exist as a unified movement. Of course, we all knew each other, because Genoa is not such a big city. We would meet, for example, at the bar on Corso d'Italia. There was no coordination, but there was a desire to emulate each other. One of the first songs I wrote was Il testamento, and I remember playing it first to Gino Paoli at his house. He listened to it in silence and at the end he said to me: “It's beautiful, but after a song like this, what else can one write?”. (p. 32)"

"I also think that Il testamento di Tito, together with Amico fragile, is my best song. It gives an idea of how laws might change if they were written by those who do not have power. It is another of the songs written from the heart, without fear of appearing rhetorical, and I can still sing it today without tiring. (p. 35)"

"For me, Genoese is not a dialect but a language; after all, dialects rise to the dignity of languages for political and military reasons. [...] Genoese has at least 2,500 words of Arabic origin, which shows how intense contact with the Arabs was. Moreover, from a commercial point of view, apart from its rather sporadic relations with Europe (England and Holland), Genoa had to focus its trade on Africa, because on the other side there was Venice, and every time Genoese ships tried to venture beyond Crete, there were fierce battles. But in those days, Genoese and Venetian were the international languages, just as French and English are today. (p. 40)"

"Interviewer: What is Fabrizio De André afraid of today? De André: Death, for sure. Not so much my own death, which, when it comes, if it gives me time to realise it, will make me feel my fair share of fear, but rather the death that surrounds us, the lack of attachment to life that I see in many of our fellow human beings who kill themselves for reasons that are certainly much more futile than the value of life. I am afraid of what I do not understand, and I really cannot understand this."

"Interviewer: What is the wish you would like to fulfil? De André: [...] definitely, anywhere, anytime, to meet my father again."

"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: What is song for you today, deep down? De André: Song is an old girlfriend with whom I would still very much like to spend a good part of my life, always and only if I am welcome."

"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)"

"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)"

"[...] 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)"

"I remember one day I grabbed my mother and pushed her against a window, so hard that she cut herself all over, and my father decided to teach me a lesson. He gave me so many lashes that my bum swelled up like a pandolce, then he asked me, 'Do you have anything to say to your mother? I said no. In retaliation, he took my sticker albums – I had five or six – and burned them all in the middle of the room. I remained impassive. He grabbed a shoe and hit me on the head with the heel. Then he repeated, “Do you have anything to say to your mother?” 'No,' I replied. He left, and I had won. (p. 20)"

"I used rubber picks to mimic the style of Jimmy Hall, a guitarist who produced a sound as soft as snow. (p. 42)"

"Three cultures intertwined in Brassens: Central European, with the waltz, French, with the java, and Neapolitan, with the tarantella [...]. That's why my first songs were based on those rhythms and that atmosphere. Then I was intrigued by the fact that he dealt with controversial issues of great social relevance, dismissing them and singing about them with the nonchalance of an English actor rather than a French one: because French actors are emphatic and declamatory, while English actors say terrifying things with a kind of icy indifference. Brassens, in short, was my great role model, even though, having had the opportunity, I always avoided meeting him in person: I needed to keep him as a myth; if this myth had collapsed upon meeting him, my world would have collapsed. So I preferred to imagine him only through his songs. (p. 43)"

"(About Luigi Tenco) Let's leave him in peace, let's stop digging him up. (p. 57)"

"(About his captors) [...] I can't say they scared me. I am more inclined to scrutinise other people's lives than my own, I am attracted to losers, I felt like an observer rather than a victim. I thought that they were the ones who were truly imprisoned, living with the same discomforts as us for a truly miserable wage [...]. Apart from my older songs such as “Il pescatore” and “Bocca di rosa”, they preferred those by Guccini. Once they begged Dori, in vain, to sing something for them. Songs I wrote later were inspired by their reflections, such as “Quello che non ho” (“What I don't have”), or by true stories they told me, such as “Franziska”. (p. 115)"

"Writing songs in Italian is technically difficult because the requirements of metre mean you need a large number of truncated words, which do not exist in Italian, or at least are not abundant. At this point, in order to guarantee the aesthetic quality of the verse, you are forced to change the meaning of what you want to say. Genoese, on the other hand, is an agile language, and it is possible to find a truncated synonym that has the same meaning as the prose outline you have jotted down and then translated into verse, since ideas rarely come to you already organised metrically. This is a problem we Italians have, while the English and French do not, as their languages are much richer in truncated words, and writing in Genoese made it much easier to solve. (p. 136)"

"I will wait tomorrow, the day after tomorrow and maybe another hundred years until Mrs Liberty and Miss Anarchy are considered by the majority of my fellow human beings as the best possible form of civil coexistence, not forgetting that in Europe, even in the mid-18th century, republican institutions were considered utopian. And remembering with pride and regret the happy and all too brief libertarian experience of Kronstadt, an episode of brotherhood and egalitarianism suddenly bombarded by Mr Trotsky. (p. 157)"

"(About marginalisation) It removes you from power and therefore from the mud. It brings you closer to God's point of view. (p. 159)"

"From what little I know, a language declines to the level of a dialect (or a dialect rises to the dignity of a language) solely for historical and political reasons and not for reasons intrinsic to the language itself. This Italian, this Florentine dialect that started out as vernacular, has become a lofty, prudish, bourgeois and bigoted language, through which not even all the terms in the vocabulary can be expressed: if you say “fica”, you'll be thrown out of the hotel. In Genoa, anyone who says “mussa” and “belín” causes no scandal. If you say it in Italian, all hell breaks loose. (p. 39)"

"Genoa played a fundamental role. Because Genoa is a hypercritical city. If you don't make people laugh or cry, you'd better stop doing those jobs. It's a very strict city and in this sense I find it very similar to Sardinia. (p. 43)"

"Dialects are idioms not imposed by authority, but invented by ethnic groups who had an urgent need to communicate: I say urgent, but in fact they had plenty of time to invent, to refine languages that increasingly resembled themselves and their surroundings. Perhaps it is not unreasonable to say that local languages resemble the places where they are spoken: thus, certain harshnesses that I find in the Aosta Valley dialect, which seem to respond to and echo the hardness of the surrounding mountain rocks, are softened in the Piedmontese dialect of the great plain, which sounds as sweet as the language of neighbouring France. Similarly, the stickiness of Ligurian, particularly Genoese, is not so far removed from the “'lepego”', the slipperiness of boat decks and piers. (p. 65)"

"When a navigator leaves the quay of the port of the city where he lives, the moment of detachment from security and certainty arrives, perhaps in the form of a wife, guardian of the marriage bed, waving a light, tear-stained handkerchief from the shore, the detachment from the little garden, from the lemon tree and, if the sailor leaves from Genoa, certainly from the pot of basil planted there on the balcony, to whet the appetite of the others, those who remain, the deserters of the sea. (p. 78)"

"To paraphrase Flaubert, we can say that while the Almighty gave Genoa the sun and the sea, he left the Milanese with rain so that they would have something to talk about, then he changed his mind and gave them fog too, so that even today they have two topics of conversation. Yet, amid this sun and this very blue (so to speak) sea, terrible tragedies have occurred, including the relatively recent sinking of the London Valour. (p. 80)"

"She was the usual generous mother in the spectacularity of the oblique and changing landscapes, an affectionate mother in bestowing a Shangri-La climate, an extremely strict parent towards those who let themselves be lulled to sleep by the rhythm of her Mediterranean breath, always warm. That was the Genoa from which I separated myself due to a love affair, and we ended up growing apart. Two different subjects: she, cradling the children who had stayed at home, the favourite parishioners of the Sunday seafront or the rough altercations dressed as princes, dockers and purple-robed entrepreneurs; I, cultivating smoky Lombardies of boundless femininity. I was a former son, a bastard and forgotten by her, and she was for me a large blue apron, perfumed with marjoram, whose scent I would remember from time to time: in short, a city to be regretted. (pp. 83-84)"

"(About Christopher Columbus) It seems to me that in Genoa there is a rather widespread attitude of astonished resignation, an attitude of contempt typical of us Genoese who, despite the clichés, are much more sensitive to moral criticism than we are to the glitter of coins. [...] All this has brought upon the innocent and astonished Genoa almost the shame of having given birth to a genius of navigation, a man who tended to be mild-mannered but who, in his mature years, made the grave mistake of putting the desire for glory and wealth before those ethical principles that no truly great man should ever fail to uphold, regardless of the historical period in which he lived. (pp. 97-98)"

"In Milan, everyone walks like mice, using very small spaces in a very short time; in Tempio, the exact opposite happens: we all walk with long strides and few worries; the spaces are still enormous and the time it takes to complete many projects can even be considered “geological time”. Genoa, from this point of view, represents an enviable middle ground. (p. 131)"

"Genoa is to Milan as Italy is roughly to Germany. Cold-blooded populations have always done everything they can to come and piss their winter fogs into our seas. (p. 132)"

"Genoa was a training ground where I practised living and, thanks also to the neighbouring cultures, thinking, writing and playing music. (p. 135)"

"“'And on your buried Genoa | not a handful of earth but | a cascade of dry leaves | with the face of Marx. | In your solitude full of faces | of children and soldiers | have you ever wondered | why challenge the sea?”' (p. 136)"

"Regardless of the game and the result, I would hardly say that the match has all the characteristics of the old class struggle: a proletarian Genoa against a plutocratic and highly decorated Milan. (p. 212)"

"The Genoese seems to be a language created for songs, just as Hebrew is a language of prophecies. (p. 234)"

"It is the people who create problems who do not change."

"If the so-called “best” among us had the courage to underestimate themselves at least a little, we would live in an infinitely better world."

"Real questions and real answers are not made up of words: they are made up of actions, gestures, deeds, works in which words can also be compressed. Yet everything we do comes at a price in terms of anxiety, failure and, if all goes well, nostalgia."

"It is much more difficult to be understood when doing good than when doing evil."

"The left must not give the elderly a “past”, but a future."

"Capitalism cannot be democratic."

"Words take up our fears and certainties, organising them in such a way as to give them a completely new life and colour: from time to time, they precipitate and climb them like new rural and urban destinies, as if they were mists drowned by the sun and distributed over the heads of real and uncertain men."

"Interviewer: You also joke a lot about death, calling it the Musona... Vanoni: I've already made arrangements: I've asked Paolo Fresu to play at my funeral, I'll wear a beautiful loose-fitting pleated dress, and I'll have my make-up artist do my make-up. I'll look great. I don't want to die late, I couldn't bear to stay at home doing nothing."

"(About the album entitled L'albero delle Fate) In my mind, the L'Albero delle Fate is a tree that we should all climb to reach the highest branch and pick the most beautiful, most important fruit. All adults should strive to rediscover the Tree of Fairies. It is, if you like, a metaphor for the imagination we have as children but lose as we grow up. Without imagination, man is nothing."

"My roots are important. I think of a blank sheet of paper on which I draw a dot with a pencil. It is essential to be able to recognise oneself in a more general context. But if globalisation means taking into account the positive aspects of many realities, I continue to be Lucano, but I am open to what others can teach me. Therefore, as someone once said, I become a citizen of the world without losing the link with my origins."

"I am a believer in my own way: I cannot believe that everything is born and ends, otherwise life would have no reason to exist; I do not bother with divinities, I believe first and foremost in man. I do not choose this or that confession: religions create too many prejudices."

"My relationship with communication is good in some ways and disastrous in others. Those who participate in Sanremo, for example, have four minutes to tell you a little about their world. Television is a truly absurd medium, capable of destroying any type of artist."

"In Gaber, the solidarity between words and sound becomes a gesture and a place in which to push the song: and thus Teatro Canzone is born, intelligent cabaret made up of sound and satire, daily tears and ancestral smiles, artistic paintings and popular songs. With Giorgio Gaber, words traverse the space of life and passionately engage in dialectical encounter with the voice of the heart: just like those who know that words are silk pyjamas, and the night is the altar that takes on their contours."

"(About Giorgio Gaber) A multifaceted artist to the point of confusing and mixing within himself his being a great actor and great singer, and then a mime, and then a subtle reciter, and then again a man with an unmistakable vocal timbre, marked like the brushstrokes of a great painter."

"I hate covers and the term “cover” because it means remaking songs. It's a concept that will never work because the comparison with the original, rightly considered untouchable, is inevitable, and it's also a bit stupid to make comparisons [...]. I try to discover the core of songs and make them my own with my style."