Mannarino is back with a new album, First Loveyet another chapter in a songwriting career that has brought intense and experienced world music to Italy. The album tells of a primordial love, and more, and the artist told it to our microphones starting from the cover.
“The cover is a painting that I bought and that excites me, there are these two characters who are taken by a light with an ascent and various beings all around. It is a painting that cannot be explained well, it was chosen for emotional reasons and not strictly linked to the music.”
Mannarino explains the lyrics of Primo Amore: “I'm talking about macrothemes”
“I don't want to explain the lyrics of the album, I'm talking about macro themes and the world. There are clearer songs and others less so. Venus, for example, I wrote in Panama in a hut.
I had this moment of retreat, two months in the forest alone, and I started writing a diary where I addressed the topic of the loves I've had in life, from the first to today. Here, this passage of love and life is a macro theme.
I managed to put my life on record but it wasn't enough for me, I also wanted to put my thoughts, as I did in Venus.”
“The market is the problem”: Mannarino on music as a product
We ask him if he feels like a foreign body compared to today's music.
“The market is the problem, it tends to take products that are immediately liked. Music is a space of freedom and I think it is very important that artists find their form, their sign, because we are all different.
Then there is aesthetics, the form that must describe the inner world. Music, for millennia, has been a community tool that was used for ceremonies, celebrations, and had a function that goes beyond the ranking or economic result.
Then when music became a product of a market the problems began.”
Five years of absence between crisis and rebirth
Five years have passed since the previous album, released in 2021. We ask him what happened in between.
“Before the artistic journey comes the human journey, I would call it self-care. Then, what I experience becomes music: a crisis, a rebirth, I have had experiences inside and outside of myself.
I don't really like talking about myself because it almost seems to distance those who listen to the record from the purity of the record. Everyone around music says we have to do interviews and podcasts and everything else. I take it on myself, but on the other hand I think I'm a nuisance for the record.
I made the record for myself and for others: my experiences remain mine, and people can find what they like in it.”
“There's nothing left of that Mannarino”? The answer
With Primo Amore the sounds are far from those of the first records. In another interview the phrase had circulated according to which there would be nothing left of that Mannarino.
“I didn't say this, it's his idea, simply because I don't think so. For me, the one who still makes me write the songs is that little boy. Bar della rage was released in 2009, there is a personal path that leads you to change aesthetics and music, and my commitment as a musician is to be contemporary with what I live.
My idea was to bring the writing system into another world, which would have even more impact in the contemporary world and not just in terms of form. There are songs like Dammi or Primo Amore that have that old soul there.”
The Primo Amore tour: a journey without breaks
With such a large discography, we ask him how he will manage the live schedule.
“I was convinced that I didn't want to do the tour linked to the album, but I like these songs so much that I want to sing almost all of them. The thing that came to mind was to bring the world of the album into the other songs too.
There will be no breaks between one piece and another, you start the journey and then end when the music ends. I want to give a psychedelic experience to those who decide to come and listen to me.”
