Posted in Folk Music, Canzone on Apr 13th, 2009 No Comments »
Angelo Branduardi is my favourite contemporary Italian singer. He’s my generation too. His songs are a mix of rock, folk and ancient music, about vague inner yearnings for a better, unrealisable world or a perfect love. There was lot of it about in the 1960s. Sometimes it’s a bit much, but a glass or two of wine releases the inner bonds of constraint and the ancient hippy in me rises to the surface. Here’s one of his best.
‘We’re rivers running to the sea, divided, yearning for each other, searching blindly, like rivers running to the sea.’
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Posted in Canzone on Oct 27th, 2008 No Comments »
In my previous post I paid homage to Jacques Brel, a singer of intense power and sincerity. Here is another singer who grabs you by the lapels and won’t let you go. It is the Italian singer Battisti. This is his song - I Giardini in Marzo. It starts gently, elegiacally, where he remembers his mother, how she used to dress; how he was at school, yearning to be free; and the evening you called ….
Then the chorus. Here we float away from these memories; he asks what day and time it is and tells us that we must live now, in this time, fully. His hand trembles no more. In his soul the heavens have opened and here in his melancholy he sees everything filled with love. Courage returns.
Listen to how he sings it.
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Posted in Canzone on Sep 2nd, 2008 No Comments »
A haunting song, Casanova, from my favourite Italian contemporary singer, Angelo Branduardi. Here are the words (my translation).
Casanova walked back to Venice like a seagull returning to its nest at night. Nostalgia accompanied him home through the perfumed shadows of women forgotten forever. Now night is coming. Now winter is coming. Casanova.
Alone and fearful, along that dusty street, he went towards the sea. Masked figures, distant seasons, illuminated gardens, reflections in the canal…. Now night is coming. Now winter is coming. Casanova.
A hundred nights, a hundred women in one life. Wonderful virgins and whores. Youth now almost an invented fairy tale…. Splendour, misery, glory and melancholy…. Now night is coming. Now winter is coming. Casanova.
As in so many of Branduardi’s songs he manages to make regret and loss seem an eternal condition.
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