Video interview with Francesca Michielin. The singer-songwriter presented her new album White Magic (Columbia Records / Sony Music Italy), three years later Loose dogs. A concept album that intertwines dungeon synth, the Middle Ages, witches and video game music, and which marks a new and openly free phase of his journey. We talked about it with her on our microphones: the absence of fear in going against the grain, the “spectres” that hover in the songs, the desire to no longer chase trends and a clear reflection on the state of health of the music industry.
Francesca Michielin Video interview
Let's start with what happened in these years of recording pause.
“A lot of things have happened, even unpleasant ones, that have affected my health, but I'm happy that they happened, because when such strong things happen to you you really question how you're living your life. Three years have passed since Loose Dogs and my thirties were very intense, full of changes. When I did the Arena di Verona something clicked: I had come from years in which I went to the studio reluctantly, because I felt I had to do it, like a toy soldier. Then I said: I've done my duties as a precocious young pop star, now I want to have some serious fun.”
Francesca Michielin and “Magia Bianca”: the Middle Ages, witches and the dungeon synth
Where did the idea for a concept album on the Middle Ages come from?
“After the Arena I wanted to go on holiday, but instead a very strong inspiration came, something that hadn't happened to me in a long time. I wanted to make a concept, talk about witches, bring in the Middle Ages, the 80s, the music from the video games I grew up with. I struggled to make the people around me understand what record I wanted to make, because it didn't have precise references. I believe that when you make pop, in 2026, you have to do a job of synthesis: you can't take a reference and copy it, it's already been So I asked myself how to create an identifying sound that I had never done and that had never been done in Italy in this way. There was a lot of research, even with a philologist, who specialized in dungeon synth, an almost unknown and non-pop genre: instrumental music, used for video games and for ambient atmospheres, which we tried to put into pop harpsichord, trying to make it pop and radio-friendly.”
“I don't give a damn”: the choice to go against the grain
It seems like you've gone completely against the grain of the direction of music today. Are you afraid?
“I don't care, sorry. I don't know what happened to me, but I don't care anymore. I quote Elisa, who in 2019, at a dinner with Dardust while we were writing for my album, told me one thing: in life, as an artist, you can choose to make music with white magic or with black magic. Black magic is doing your homework, the song that doesn't go out of line, staying on track because if you go out of your way you potentially won't be streamed, you won't fill the concerts, you won't be on the radio. Or you can choose to take risks to do that extra thing. I've always dreamed of making pop with a more complex mix of things, also because, except for one track, they're all danceable songs.”
The state of health of music: “Everything has changed after the pandemic”
Willie Peyote said we all agree that things aren't good for anyone right now, psychologically. Share?
“Yes, I agree. Psychologically it is not a moment of great serenity for artists, there are many young people who are ill and take very right breaks. If I had started now, at sixteen, I don't think I would have made it, because the pressure is very strong. There is a strange obsession with numbers: sometimes it is as if the public behaves like record companies, and my record companies don't make me as paranoid as the public sometimes makes me. That carefreeness that I have tried making an album like 2640 has vanished a bit. It's as if, together with Covid, a virus had also entered the industry.”
So is the pandemic the moment that everything changed?
“In my opinion, yes. From the pandemic onwards, making music has become something different, as if there was time to recover quickly. Before there was almost a competition to be original, to bring that thing that only you can say, to have your own stylistic signature. Now it's more reassuring to stay within a path, because it is a historical moment of great anxiety. But in the end, the one who goes outside the path wins. Historically we remember the artists who at a certain point did something totally outside the box: Battiato, Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel. I keep looking back at Genesis' live at the Bataclan, Musical Box, in which Peter Gabriel comes out at a certain point and goes back on stage dressed as a woman with a fox mask. But why?
The live performances between costumes, masks and camp culture
Are you planning to do something like this in your live shows?
“Actually yes, last night I did a concert with elf ears. This project is aesthetically inspired by camp culture, by being exaggerated and outside the box as a sense of extreme freedom. Live we bring it in multiple formations, with strong research on costumes, sets and make-up. In the theater there will be all hell, I promise you special effects.”
The Middle Ages as a mirror of the present
From a textual point of view, the Middle Ages also becomes a mirror of the present.
“There wasn't a spark, but a gradual awareness. I had a podcast, and an episode that had never been released asked whether it was right to talk about the Middle Ages as a dark age. I hear more and more often, even in the supermarket, phrases like 'it seems like we're back in the Middle Ages'. In reality, today, especially on social media, I see certain attitudes again: witch hunts, digital burnings, finding the next person to burn. So I thought of making an album about the Middle Ages not only as a dark age that we are reliving, but also recovering the ideal and fantasy Middle Ages of witches, ladies, knights and dragons, which has even become viral in memes. The Middle Ages as a mirror of our soul, which still dreams of living in a castle and leaving Milan. We all need escape, but escape as an end in itself makes no sense: so I played with the sounds and concepts of the Middle Ages while also putting in a criticism of today's society.”
Is there a real figure from that era that you would bring into today's world?
“It would be nice to have Dante here, to be able to talk to him and write pieces. And it would be nice to talk to the mystical figures of the time, I think of Hildegarda of Bingen, these mystical women who had visions and were one with what they believed in. They had a deep love for nature, they healed themselves with herbs, there was respect for the knowledge handed down between women, and the whole concept of the Sabbath, of seasonality, of community celebration that we have lost today. It is no coincidence that in a such a dark historical moment, songs like Lux by Rosalía are released: there is a need to return to a spirituality that has been lost.”
The “spectres” of “White Magic”: from Caparezza to La Representative di Lista
Is there a song that took you longer to digest?
“Lita. It's a song created together with David Kosten, producer of Bat for Lashes and Marina. Caput and I went to London during the Epiphany to write with him, with the anxiety of meeting one of our myths. It's the song that breaks the mold more than any other. In London it was liberating, because people make music in a completely different way. That piece didn't even have a timing, it was born without BPM, recording on a toy keyboard which was then sampled. It was a great game of subtraction: few sounds but the right ones, because we don't like compressed and destroyed sounds. It's the song with which I faced all the last preconceptions I had in making music, and now I've freed myself completely.”
In this album there are no real featurings, but presences. Can you tell us about them?
“There are no feats, but ghosts, presences that hover in the songs. In Strega Commanda there is Caparezza who quotes his own heretical dream. There is Patrizia Laquidara who does the voice of the anguana, there is Angelica who does the backing vocals of 1484, there is Veronica della Representative di Lista in Infernal Girl and there is Cenere, with whom I wrote Magia bianca magia nera, who creates a sort of specter that hovers in the song.”
A new phase, in short, experienced lightly and without fear. What Francesca Michielin he rightly calls it a small personal, as well as musical, Renaissance.
Photo by Laura Salerno.
