It is not easy to write about yourself and your job. It is not easy in general, but it is even less easy if the recipient of the written one is not a personal diary, but someone else. Do I have to really get naked? Or do I also have to perform in the self -analysis of what I write?
If we do a little longer, it's not so different from writing a song. Or at least, what a song means for me: I take a good dose of chaos and experiences that I have not yet completely metabolized, and I try to give them a form that can be understood by those who listen to me. And from myself.
When I started writing For you, that you will no longer be there I didn't know where I wanted to go. The very first verses of the piece that gives the title to this EP I wrote them ten minutes after closing a six -year relationship. It was summer and I was sitting on the sofa of the house where I lived until a couple of years ago. It was the first time that I was writing about something in a language that was not English, but those few verses remained there more or less until last autumn, while I was the last dates of the tour of Stillness, stop. I was very frustrated, at that moment, because the whole process of creating that album had been really suffered and had tired me a lot. I wanted, and not just need, to reverse the trend with which I was facing making music for myself. I decided that I would face this urgency as an urgency, and not as the premise for a record that was to be “perfect” at all costs.
I asked Marco, Nicholas and Giulio – friends and companions of music – to face together and without too many superstructures the arrangement of these pieces. We found ourselves in Milan, for a total of five or six days of rehearsals between November and February, with only melodies, texts and agreements. Everyone put their part on the table: the musical choices taken were simply the choices that played right to everyone, without asking ourselves “what we are choosing is the best possible choice?”, But deciding as a approach that, if in our hearts a solution worked, it was not necessary to seek others.
With this gigantic premise, I put some reflection here on each piece.
Distract
What shape does the empty space left by someone's disappearance has? A phone number that can no longer be used, or maybe an angle of empty floor.
In 2021, between February and March, I first lost my dear friend of mine and then my dog. It was two devastating two months. I remember that, returning home in the morning after greeted the Nani for the last time (this was the name of my chest), I slept for a couple of hours, crying in Dirotto. I woke up that spring morning and his kennel was gone. In its place, a ray of sunshine on the floor. It seemed like a joke. I took the phone and wrote: “I don't know if the sun of this morning I have to take it as an insult to your memory or as its celebration”.
A note on music in the strict sense. From a harmonious, distracted point of view, it is a very simple song (the stanzas, if we want to call them that, are literally composed of three agreements), and therefore I needed to camouflage this simplicity and its “brilliance” to be able to release it only in closing. The first time we tried this piece, it didn't come immediately. We did not understand how to make harmony a little more sneak Without intellectualizing it too much, so we focused more on a game of rhythmic fits and melodic distortions. I think that in the end we managed to make it a piece that, while carrying a certain heaviness behind, has an air and a desire to open up to what comes later.
このままでいい
I remember writing for the first time in my life of the “texts” in English when I was in middle school. I am sure that having soon started to express myself in a language other than Italian, and therefore to make what I was studying something alive and that I could use in reality, made me advance a lot in learning English. Writing for yourself is practicing.
Japanese study for four years. It is a language as beautiful as it is difficult, but one of the things that fascinates me most (as a western and European person) is how the grammatical and syntactic diversity of a language obliges yourself to organize thoughts in a different way. By studying Japanese, and trying to write in Japanese, I realized a posteriori of a dynamic that there is also between writing in Italian and English. Each language, with its specificities, leads you to organize thought and read reality in a specific way. In addition to the clear differences in the vocal stamp in singing in different languages (moreover, to issue different sounds, different muscles are used), there is a difference in the way in which it draws on the “raw” material that underlies writing. Who knows, perhaps it is also for this reason that some things in a language sound tremendously embarrassing, and in an incredibly poetic high.
Lazy
Always, inside me, there are two forces perpetually in conflict: on the one hand the very self -critical and almost demolition tendency that I have towards me, on the other the constant push to want to overcome this tendency to get off and want to run forward towards a better place. The title, which means “lazy”, is in fact one of the ways in which I judge myself most often when I can't do something: you can't because you are lazy, you don't apply enough – and by extension so you are not enough. At the same time, however, I am aware of being a person who is capable of putting love in things and in the world around him, and I am not going to make me take this thing away, not even from myself.
If we had not had the impromptu approach that we had in arranging these pieces, Lazy He would certainly have had richest arrangements (jokingly, during the tests we said that this was the piece at Bacharach), with arches or horns or both.
For you, that you will no longer be there
This piece for me represents an end, but also a beginning. It is a dedication, but also in some way a wish to find some beautiful things after they close those that had to be closed. I think it's the first song by Any Other where I also sing someone else: on the final part of the song, there is a melodic response that Marco, Nicholas, Giulio and Alessandro have done. I needed to do this together not only for an aesthetic reason (I think that counter -anti has come very well!), But also and above all for a human and emotional reason: at this moment I need to do what I love with the people I love, and this EP has been the demonstration that I know this thing and I can do it.
It is not easy to write about myself and my work. For some reason, now that I am thirty years old I feel tiny and gigantic at the same time. But I am really happy to have done this EP in such an impromptu way, without asking too many questions about how I had to do it. I want to take things for what they are, both in my daily life and in making music. Honestly, now as now I don't want to rationalize too much: I want to live in this gray area in which I write songs in different languages, I explore different ways of approaching the tools that I play, I try to do things that scare me. I think I have to learn to make mistakes, to realize that even if I am wrong nothing happens, and that the world goes on, everyone goes on (and I can also go on). Who cares about the expectations on records, at work. In the end, to make music, you have to feel good. It's okay like this.
