Lucio Corsi and the reinvention of the past

He sang of astronauts who arrive on the moon and find a hare, of a child who goes around the death on the swing and disappears into thin air, of a friend so dry that the wind takes him away, of the plan to dig a hole and arrive in China. He transfigured the world with an unbridled fantasy and made himself loved by telling us what we would never imagine. We looked at a train, he saw the spirit of an old reddaus, we listened to a record, he felt a spaceship. He made us understand over three albums and a pair of EP that does not think about the world by forcing the limits of rationality to escape, but to imagine a better one. He never opened his eyes to return to our faded reality.

Now Lucio Corsi has changed and Sanremo has nothing to do with it. In the album he published today and that is entitled like the song I wanted to be a tough He holds his feet more firmly on the ground. Instead of singing of things, animals and astronavians he tells of himself and his friends, true or imaginary, true and at the same time imaginary. It is not a retreat, it is a refined change, there is the idea of ​​trying to paint portraits in music without giving up the size of the dream. “Stopping change is fundamental,” he says courses during a short interview. «I wanted to resume reality from another perspective, which is not that of a drone, but that of a room at the ground level. And from that point of view many things can still be fantastic. I imposed it on me, I wanted to learn to write this type of song more direct and simple too ». He did very well.

And therefore I wanted to be a tough It is also a gallery of characters who often have a name and sometimes even a surname. As Francis Delacroixa Talkin 'Blues that reappears in certain' 60s songs by Bob Dylan, hallucinations written with the freedom of the beats in which historical and fictitious characters lived in the present and everything was possible, also that Cain and Abel were contemporary of Cinderella and the hunchback of Notre Dame. In Francis Delacroix The photographer (“imprisoner of voices and noises”, in the racing language) becomes an epic furfante, a catalyst for life and trouble, a liar who always says the truth, one who swears that he had smoked with the Buddha in the dressing room of Bob Dylan, one who “in June '44 was on the Holy Maria when they landed in a painting in Picasso and discovered the Normandy”. It's not true, but it's true. And it is very rock'n'roll this impulse to invent for itself and its friends a more beautiful, adventurous and unpredictable world than what we touch.

I wanted to be a tough It is also a record on childhood and adolescence, and therefore on memories and perhaps also on the passing time and that must be exorcised. You are the morning tells the discovery of sex and I wanted to be a tough The vain ambitions of when you grow. Let there be rocko It is the story of the daring tones of a medium partner, while The king of the rave He is a character of when Corsi was a boy, a “romantic and ramshackle shape”, I would also say a little toxic. I think back to those days with taste and fun, it has a tender and affectionate look towards that era and those people. “It is a reinvented childhood. If you reimgate it, the past can also become surprising as the future ».

In Italy we have a beautiful tradition of provincial songs, of small marginal events that thanks to the talent and empathic observation become epic, the taverns of Guccini, on Sunday morning in Zocca di Vasco Rossi, the games of cards at the Ligabue bar. It is our national heritage, they are stories that sometimes we forget we have and enhanced. Courses, which grew up in the province of Grosseto, is happy to come from the countryside and tells people and corners of the provincial world, where “boredom forces you to make your imagination work”. It transforms them into small colorful and a little hallucinated sound films, exercising a imagination that has no equal in the Italian song today. «They are stories full of life, of escapes, of unattainable dreams. They are magnificent precisely because they are tiny, but epic. They are gigantic because they were born in a small place ».

In The people who dream Courses evoked the glam rock and built certain songs by superimposing layers on strata of music, “with the desire to throw everything into it”. I wanted to be a tough Instead, it has a ladder sound, despite being beautiful arrangements for arches (Davide Rossi) and wind (Enrico Gabrielli). It is a deliberately simpler disc from a musical point of view precisely because it runs around the texts, “that are less dreamlike and so the music also has fewer frills”. Corsi is inspired as always in the past, from John Cale to Ivan Graziani, an influence perhaps never so evident, from the Blues Brothers to Edoardo Bennato, but unlike many others he has enough personalities to make you understand that that music is also his, who does not take it for loan, that is inside. It also takes his way of singing simple and tender, spontaneous and light, sweet but not sweet, natural and exciting, a style that brings with it that little comedy (or tragicomedy) that it takes.

The disc ends with six minutes and passes by In the middle of the nightone of those songs that could go on indefinitely, the story of turns in the car with friends looking for who knows what. Courses can be discovered a little, which is rare, in Cigarettes and especially in This lifewhich is a sort of dialogue with itself, or rather “a two -way reflection with my brain” designed as certain old things of Rino Gaetano or Alberto Fortis. It is a song about this life that “crushes us but has no weight” and is at the same time melancholy and joyful, if not liberating. It is not all intelligible and Corsi says it is beautiful: “They are private things and then it is fascinating when you listen to a piece and you don't know exactly what the author wanted to say.” The strength of certain songs is also in indeterminate.

And therefore after Sanremo there is this album which is not the great artistic declaration that maybe someone was expecting, but a small record that is great for this. From when he ended up on everyone's mouth and has even announced two concerts in the racecourse (where he will be accompanied not only by his band of seven elements, but also by winds and choirs, and will be inspired by Rolling Thunder Revuea The Last Waltza Wings Over America), whoever loves his music has begun to ask themselves: isn't it that Lucio Corsi will become like everyone else? I wanted to be a tough He tells us that he has not distorted himself. He adds that “all this happened to me fortunately at 30 years of age and after years of concerts, records and relationships that allow me to remain anchored to the things I love, music, songs. Nothing has changed. I and I boys with whom we keep our feet on the ground. We are like certain trees that grow and then dig the pit where they came out ».