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DIO È MORTO
L’IMMENSITÀ
LONTANO DAGLI OCCHI
IL CIELO IN UNA STANZA
DEDICATO
LA CANZONE DI MARINELLA
C’È CHI DICE NO
IO CHE NON VIVO SENZA TE
IO CHE AMO SOLO TE
MAMMA
INSIEME A TE NON CI STO PIÙ
CARUSO
IL MONDO
PUGNI CHIUSI
’O SOLE MIO
UN’AVVENTURA
VOLARE [NEL BLU DIPINTO DI BLU]
(This text is translated from the original Italian press kit.)
HITALIA: AN ITALIAN ALBUM FOR TODAY
This is an Italian album for today, and today everything in Italian music is shaken
into one big cocktail: Sanremo, Cantagiro, Disco per L’Estate, Festivalbar,
authentic 1960s pop; singer-songwriters from Gino Paoli to Vasco Rossi, which
became mass Italian music from the 1970s onwards; song-song-squared penned
by well-educated musicians and well-read lyricists; generational words and
perfect texts, those right from the heart and those right from the textbook.
No more black-or-white distinctions, in our memories it’s now all rolled into one.
Just plain twentieth-century Italian songs, that were simply able to score a point,
make a mark.
Nannini hasn’t chosen the most popular Italian hits ever recorded; she’s picked
out the loveliest of the most popular. Not a revival-drunk jukebox but a choice
from the head and the heart made with a head and heart of a musician, a singer,
a songwriter.
Gianna writes: ‘What’s it like to sing other people’s songs? I don’t do it much
but it’s liberating to lend my voice to someone else’s inspiration. So I decided to
record them, because I like them, and because their quality has a rational appeal,
but above all because they talk to my heart.’
TECHNIQUE AND HISTORY OF ITALIAN HIT SINGLES
(OVERVIEW)
Hitalia is first and foremost a perfect example of the short sweet song, one that’s
in a hurry and doesn’t hang around, ‘sparing’ just three minutes for insights that
would need an entire musical to express. It was the blessing and the spoiling of
the 45 rpm, which had to hit you like a slap then take root permanently in your
memory. We Italians were good at those too, wham! bam! thank you ma’am!
Catchy songs as soon as you heard them on the radio or on TV, appealing
enough to keep more and more and more of them coming.
But that was another Italy, another market (22,000,000 records sold just in 1962,
and that was only the beginning), another media horizon, overshadowed by the
RAI monopoly (with its own censorship committee), another kind of discography
and music publishing, perhaps more spontaneous, privateering, naive. Everything
was unique, new, special. From the late-1950s revolution, with the Italian
economic boom, but also rock&roll, Modugno and the so-called ‘screamers’, a
new kind of music and with it the new business of garnering new trends among
youth. In Italy, like in France, Germany and the UK, just about to
kick-start the entire continent. Many of the tracks on Hitalia burst with that
energy, the throbbing that Nannini captures with animal instinct and her own
private memories. She was just a child, but a child who was already listening,
ready to devour a song, savour it, digest it, now spit it out with every ounce of
pure Italian (well Siena, so naturally more ‘stroppy’) energy, but for decades
tuned into the sound going around, from London to Berlin.
THE SONGWRITERS
The elite of modern Italian songwriters are to be found on Hitalia: Paoli, Guccini,
De André, Fossati, Dalla, Vasco (indeed Rossi-Solieri) and the legendary brain
trust Don Backy-Mogol, Mogol-Battisti, Donaggio-Pallavicini, Conte-Pallavicini,
Migliacci-Modugno, Meccia-Boncompagni-Pes-Fontana, Endrigo-EnriquezBardotti, Beretta-Gianco-Dall’Aglio, Bixio-Cherubini, Capurro-Di Capua. Craft and
inspiration, oldies and newbies, tacky refrains and razor-sharp slogans. Pop artists
who are the successors of melodrama, pioneers of the most intense, personal
songs, hit-makers who stormed charts in and out of Italy, proud trendsetters,
intentional purists.
There’s always been life in Italian songs, long before the never-to-be-repeated
Sixties-Seventies season of singer-songwriters. Nannini – one of regrettably few
female voices – always had the guts to play all her cards: all on her own, music
and words, or partnered by colleagues for one or the other. A singer-songwriter
from the get-go, her eighteen discs of new tracks have seen her in the role of
musician or songwriter or both, depending on necessity, inspiration, expediency.
Setting aside this tactic, she approached the seventeen classics on Hitalia with
a very different mind-set. She has nothing to defend, nothing to pluck out: she’s
singing, penetrating, devouring the soul of these songs. As a songwriter herself
she ponders the words and the chords, touching up and streamlining, loosening
up or tightening up, but always with love.
ARRANGEMENTS AND SOUND
The seventeen Hitalia classics were given Noughties treatment: guitars always;
electronic, hypnotic dub and beat when needed; strings by Will Malone, recorded
in London at Abbey Road, included almost everywhere. A London musician
with an interesting background, now on his seventh Nannini album. Producer,
composer and arranger for the likes of Black Sabbath, Iron Maiden, Todd
Rundgren, The Verve (Bitter Sweet Symphony), Massive Attack (Unfinished
Sympathy), Depeche Mode (One Caress), and the legendary arranger of The
Who’s Tommy for the London Symphony Orchestra, he was just twelve when
he decided the way to go after first hearing Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings
op.11, one of the most poignant pieces of twentieth-century American classical
music. It’s as if Will Malone had begun all his truly personal work as Hitalia
producer and arranger from two stubborn string notes that Ennio Morricone
wove into his fabric for one of the album’s key tracks, Jimmy Fontana’s Il mondo,
by her own admission the spark that triggered the whole operation for Gianna.
In a sense Malone and Maestro Morricone, Malone and Italian music of that time
(which he may only just have heard for the first time), but above all Malone and
Nannini, are kith and kin. He’s loved her to bits for years for her fiery musical
talent.
So Malone knows his orchestra has to sing AGAINST her voice and WITH it: no
filling in or embellishing, just singing. And getting an orchestra to sing when
Gianna’s rock voice explodes against the blazing guitars of band leader Davide
Tagliapietra, is no mean feat. Especially if he’s got a stellar rhythm section
behind him formed by Simon Philips (drummer and producer for artists like Jeff
Beck, The Who, Judas Priest, Tears for Fears, Mike Oldfield, Gary Moore, and
whose career began aged 19 with Phil Manzanera and Brian Eno in 801 Live,
then continued in tours with Toto, Jack Bruce, David Gilmour, Frank Zappa, and
countless others) and Francis Hylton (from Galliano’s acid jazz to Incognito’s jazz
funk). Not to mention keyboards and programming in the hands of an old diehard
like Leandro Gaetano, who has been with Gianna forever, and on the Italian scene
since the 1970s, when he was in Lucio Dalla’s band and a founder member of The
Area. Then there’s the Hitalia sound, lean, metallic, keen sound forged by Alan
Moulder, a key producer of Brit sound from the 1980s, from The Jesus and Mary
Chain to Placebo, Arctic Monkeys, Nine Inch Nails, The Smashing Pumpkins, Foo
Fighters.
TRACKS
01. DIO È MORTO
Distorted guitars, flaming beat, but the Metro Voices mixed polyphonic choir step
up to add epic nuance to the first masterpiece of Italian ‘protest songs’, penned
by Francesco Guccini and launched by The Nomadi at the 1967 Cantagiro (The
Equipe 84 rejected it, scared of ruining their image). RAI censored it but Vatican
Radio promoted it in the years after the Second Vatican Council. ‘Ho visto’ (refers
to the ‘I saw’ of Beat poet Allen Ginsberg’s Howl) is the key verse underpinning
the entire song. While making the album Gianna wrote: ‘I opened my eyes, I saw!
When I think of yesterday in the studio and how I got so into Dio è morto . . . I felt
as if I could see in that one song everything that rock means to me, like a faith,
not out of habit and not to hide from fear.’
02. L’IMMENSITÀ
The introduction tells the story of when a very young Nannini met Don Backy,
against a hypnotic, cutting-edge electronic groove with ‘stubborn ethnic’ guitars,
then fleshed out by the strings. One of Italy’s all-time great songs (performed for
the first time by Don Backy and Johnny Dorelli, Sanremo 1967) given the Nannini
treatment.
03. LONTANO DAGLI OCCHI
Wicked bad distorted guitar and for a split second there’s a flash of curlymopped heavy metal guitarists swaying in unison. Then Gianna’s feisty ‘Che
cos’è?’ and sweeping strings wake us up from the dream: we’re in the soul of
Sergio Endrigo, one of Italy’s finest singers. From another Sanremo, the 1969
edition, when Paul McCartney’s Apple protégée Mary Hopkin (Those Were the
Days) partnered our man from Trieste (but Vangelis and Demis Roussos also
covered it, with Aphrodite’s Child). Who knows if they knew that the great lyricist
Sergio Bardotti stole the idea for the words from Seneca?
04. IL CIELO IN UNA STANZA [featuring Gino Paoli]
Fantastic intro with electronic rhythmic house figuration, strings offering just a
simple four-note counterpoint, a hint of dub rhythm, and the voices of Gianna
and Gino (eighty years young and in better shape than ever), in continuous
tempo rubato phrasing. Two utterly opposite performing styles – the distant,
elegant, subtle Gino and a vibrant, unbridled Gianna worthy of Puccini – in a firstever duet. An intensely contemporary version. Then there’s the story: the room in
the brothel suddenly turning into a cathedral, a forest, infinity itself: very Nannini.
05. DEDICATO
Basic hammering beat (but with veiled oriental-Beatle shades) and new verses
dedicated to Italy in the finale. Tailored brilliantly by Ivano Fossati for the voice
of another pasionaria, Loredana Berté, in 1978, under the watchful eye of Mario
Lavezzi. Another version was recorded by Dalida, yet another pasionaria, but a
sad one. Strange things, women and songs.
06. LA CANZONE DI MARINELLA
Turned inside out, jumbled, reassembled. Surface organ and guitars with
underlying obsessive – fascinating – phrasing. Quite different and a million
miles away from the mood of the original ballad. We’re on the other side of the
Sanremo tracks in the Italian Sixties: the stark story of a provincial prostitute
drowned by her pimp in the river near where she worked, transformed into
enigmatic, poignant poetry. So in 1964 there was life in Italy beyond the hit
parade (but Mina still got the song there in 1967). Above all, there was a rich
young man moved by the stories of the lowly: Fabrizio De André. Nannini’s
interpretation seems to layer on all the drama of modern life, she makes it our
story as she sings the story of yet another murdered woman.
07. C’È CHI DICE NO [very special guest: Vasco Rossi]
The jagged metallic riffs of today, but Sergeant Pepper style horns that add a
strange vintage rock symphonic effect (after all the song is almost thirty years
old). Vasco makes an understated entrance only in the final chorus, but in a
crescendo of intensity. ‘Last night I dreamed of Vasco,’ said Nannini, ‘and I told
him I was doing this song: he was happy. Then I did it for real and I called him:
even on the phone he sounds like he’s singing and we had such a laugh. But I was
missing his voiceprint: in the end he added it!!!’
08. IO CHE NON VIVO SENZA TE
Dusty Springfield, Elvis, Cher. So many artists have fallen in love with this
Pino Donaggio with its 6/8 refrain, from way back in 1965 when he sang it at
Sanremo. Here the 6/8 goes out of the window and after an old-style guitar
and staccato strings intro, and Gianna’s voice looming dark in the foreground
without a rhythm section, in comes a solid, modern beat around which the strings
can be Sanremo-ish to their hearts’ content. Nannini explains: ‘Io che non vivo
senza te needs a rock twist, putting some space between it and Italian melodic
tradition, but without ripping it apart. Rock can be used to take hold of a melody
and re-examine bel canto. But here we’re talking about more than a nostalgic
tune, which in the long run is going to be feeble. I like to look at melody from
a different slant, with drumbeat and big groove so I can surf its waves with my
voice. Pino Donaggio where are you? Because I’d like to hug you for all the stuff I
feel when I sing your song.’
09. IO CHE AMO SOLO TE
Sergio Endrigo sang in 1962 with a musical detachment somewhere between
Chopin and Rachmaninoff, steeped in nostalgic accordion notes and fast
string scales soaring towards the acutes. Here it’s just a simple acoustic guitar
accompaniment imprinting a rhythmic beat, with electric phrasing deliberately
drawing in a compulsive modern feel totally alien to the original version. Gianna
pares it all down and strikes at the heart of the melody, totally rejecting Endrigo’s
beautiful earnest – albeit touching – interpretation.
10. MAMMA
‘Mamma, my song flies just for you / Mamma, you’ll be with me, you won’t be
alone again! / How much I love you! / These are words of love / that my heart
whispers to you / may no longer be in use / Mamma! / but you’re the most
beautiful song there is! / You are life / and in this life I will never leave you again.’
It’s no mean feat, in 2014, to get the better of the 1940 Bixio-Cherubini mommy’s
boy rhetoric lyrics (but even at the time Cherubini conceded that perhaps they
were ‘a little out of fashion’). Nannini’s rock interpretation, in 12\8 (‘body accents’,
as our University of Siena Arts graduate defines them in her dissertation on ‘the
body in the voice’), makes it almost an electric saltarello, light years away from
the earnest, sentimental rendering offered in every version from Beniamino Gigli
to Luciano Pavarotti. Gianna’s parents’ song and as a mother, she dedicates it to
her own mother Giovanna, who died recently.
11. INSIEME A TE NON CI STO PIÙ
There was something about the year – 1968 – this song was written by the thenlawyer and amateur provincial musician Paolo Conte (also co-authoring another
hit with Pallavicini that year, Azzurro, for Celentano) for a jittery Caterina Caselli.
This is a song about the end of a love affair, but cool, anti-sentimental, without
regrets. Which is basically the secret of this fascinating evergreen. Nannini gives
it a hint of Police with bass, drums and rhythm guitars in unison, while loose
electric guitar solo phrasing can be heard in the back. Gianna’s voice is parched,
desertified, sandpapered. In a word, disenchantment is the winner and that may
be the right way to read it today.
12. CARUSO
Lucio Dalla loved and hated it but never said so, as was the case with all his
songs that enjoyed runaway success. Quoting Warhol, Nannini (who has found
herself in the same boat many times, from America to Fotoromanza, from Bello
e Impossibile to Profumo, Sei nell’anima, I maschi, a song that Dalla said was one
of the finest ever written by Gianna) has some wise words: ‘Songs belong to the
air, not to those who write them. It’s the mystery of creation. Air is melody, the
one you sing in the kitchen, in the shower, when you’re whitewashing the walls of
your house, when you least expect it and you just “emanate” it so spontaneously,
without thinking. As do those who hear it, then write and record it.’ Or eventually
perform it, like Gianna here, with a gritty, aching intensity. A lovely introduction
of just voice and strings, followed by a mysterious bass ‘sequencer’, peppered
with drumbeat and an electric guitar solo appearing and returning, salvaging and
simplifying the compelling melody that makes the song so easy to identify. This
reinterpretation is innovative and dramatic, and who knows what that alchemist
Lucio would have made of it (he’d have liked it for sure, if we learned anything of
him over the years).
13. IL MONDO
Let’s start with Nannini: ‘Are there lyrics more topical than Il Mondo? Before it
was you, but now I realize that not so far away there’s a world, adventure, the
unknown. I started with this song because I was drawn to the musical poetics of
the text, because life changes, so does love, and the show turns into the others
around you. This is the first piece of the puzzle in my autobiography in songs, a
reality to be shared, an escape to “the world”, just like when I was fourteen. It was
a time when at that age the only worry was to get a boyfriend, but for me it was
different: my heart churned for music in the world.’ Let’s check what the lyrics,
by Meccia and Gianni Boncompagni, have to say: ‘No, my love, tonight I didn’t
think about you again / I opened my eyes to look around me / and the world was
turning around me as always . . . / The world / has never stopped for a moment
/ night always follows day / and day will come.’ The Hitalia version opens with
a reinvented rock riff that kick-starts the whole arrangement. Malone’s strings
are definitely there but pulled back from the voice, because here Gianna sings
with extra passion and power, and we feel she has taken the words to heart. Her
version is epic, hot, rock. If you want to know how to save yourself from revival,
this much-loved song and secret heart of the whole Hitalia operation, will show
you the way.
14. PUGNI CHIUSI
A powerful electric guitar arpeggio serving as the harmonic pedal stays as solid
as the Big Bang to cadence the song, while bass and drums do a proper job.
Sung very well by Nannini, with a tension that conjures up the rock soul of the
original by Demetrio Stratos (great friend and teacher, in a sense, of Gianna
the experimenter then scholar of song and its possibilities) but not the Ribelli
1967 ‘sob singing’, which only became a powerful, experimental tool years later,
leaving its mark on all Italian music.
15. ’O SOLE MIO [featuring Massimo Ranieri]
Deeply sincere Nannini and her imagery: ‘We need the sun, when our life goes
and darkness arrives. Some are born into the light, some into darkness. I was
made for the light but often I fall in love with the Dark. ‘O sole mio, a starry caress
to prepare us for the next winter . . . I’ll warm you because I’m an underground
volcano, because I don’t waste energy, but I gather it for myself. I’m your volcano,
I’m human. Time is cruel, the day is coming, but I’m . . . in the sun.’ An 1800s’
drawing room piano leads us neatly astray in what is really the most performed
Italian song in the world. What can the reckless Gianna (as a young fan of Ranieri,
after his concert, she offered to give him a lift back to his hotel on a thundering
motorbike) surprise us with here? A tight, almost punk rock beat and her voice
plunges as it should, but always under the spoken and sung ‘protection’ of
Massimo Ranieri and the Metro Voices choir. So a quick, feverish ride but with a
sense of tradition. Neapolitans and Italians give thanks. The rest of the world will
be undecided.
16. UN’AVVENTURA
Ah! Early Mogol–Battisti, 1969, enamoured of R&B, swooping into Sanremo
for the first and last time, bringing along a legend like Wilson Pickett! Nannini
and Malone start it as a sort of slow reggae but waste no time in making it an
aggressive guitar-rich explosion. Worth mentioning that when Gianna did early
1970s song contests (forerunners of today’s talent shows) she always took her
own original work and this Battisti song, which she performed accompanying
herself on the guitar. Perhaps that’s why nobody sings Battisti’s modernity the
way she does. She really seems to believe in it.
17. VOLARE (NEL BLU DIPINTO DI BLU)
We could call it MetalModugno, driven by blazing guitars. Except for the 32’ of
brilliant pizzicato introducing Gianna’s dreamlike voice, that gives no inkling of
the rock monster about to be unleashed. But anyone bothered by the wicked
guitars, listen up and hear Malone’s wonderful arrangement, who may be at his
peak here, in a constant back-and-forth between past and present. A game,
a sweet game that makes this last track – known and loved around the world,
covered endlessly by everyone from Sinatra to Frank Zappa – one of Hitalia’s
most intense interpretations.
DISCOGRAPHY 1
2013
INNO
2011
IO E TE
2009
2009
DREAM
SOLO I SOGNI SONO VERI
DREAM
SOLO I SOGNI SONO VERI
+EXTRADREAM
2008
GIANNABEST
2006
2007
PIA
COME LA CANTO
IO
GRAZIE
2004
PERLE
2002
ARIA
2002
MOMO
ALLA CONQUISTA DEL
TEMPO
DISCOGRAPHY 2
1998
CUORE
1995
DISPETTO
1991
GIANNISSIMA
1988
MALAFEMMINA
1996
BOMBOLONI
1993
X FORZA X AMORE
1990
SCANDALO
1987
MASCHI E ALTRI
DISCOGRAPHY 3
1986
PROFUMO
1984
PUZZLE
1981
G.N.
1985
TUTTO LIVE
1982
LATIN LOVER
1981
SCONCERTO ROCK
COLONNA SONORA
1979
CALIFORNIA
1977
UNA RADURA