Ligabue - Between Via Emilia and rock

Lambrusco coltelli rose & popcorn (Wea), released in September 1991, is the offspring of the first leg of the Neverending Tour, a long series of dates that would continue until the promotion of the third album. Unlike the debut, the second album was recorded in a more comfortable setting – at Medicina Blanche in Modena – drawing on a wider range of instruments and on a band – the same one – that now even had a name: Clandestino. With his second album, Ligabue codifies, starting from the title itself, what had already been sketched out on his debut record. If Ligabue is the dress rehearsal, Lambrusco coltelli rose & popcorn is the staging, that is, the more conscious, more considered and more sophisticated rendering of what had already been told.

The record draws more boldly on the American folk-country tradition, as shown by "Camera con vista sul deserto", "Ti chiamerò Sam (se suoni bene)" and the closing "Regalami il tuo sogno". The first track, in particular, opens with a slide guitar that ushers in Ligabue's ever-expressive voice, which, building to an almost elegiac crescendo, winds its way through the threads of a sinuous ballad, even taking on western tones where Massimo Lugli's harmonica cuts clean through the drama of living in a world so insignificant that it comes across as arid and parched. "Camera con vista sul deserto" is in all likelihood the most underrated song in Ligabue's entire catalogue, as well as the boldest the songwriter from Emilia has ever written. The track, with brushes caressing the drums, is enriched by a text surprisingly poetic and refined by the artist's usual standards, and also represents Ligabue's only attempt to explore vaguely jazz-inflected territory.

The album's opening track, "Salviamoci la pelle!!!!", revisits the sounds and themes of the debut. There's the riff that drives the song, just as in "Balliamo sul mondo", and there's the need to escape felt by a couple whose dreams are bigger than what a small provincial town can offer them. An attempt at escape that moves, finally, from the intellectual (the myths of American cinema in "Marlon Brando è sempre lui") to the real, in order to break free from a fate that seems inescapable, just as Tracy Chapman sang four years earlier in "Fast Car" ("any place is better, starting from zero, got nothing to lose"). Ten years before that, Lucio Dalla described the same longing for escape with these words: "Ma dimmi tu dove sarà, dov'è la strada per le stelle, mentre ballano si guardano e si scambiano la pelle, e cominciano volare"; Ligabue, with his threadbare poetic vocabulary, can only write lines like these: "Poi lei si volta per un momento, guarda quel posto ed accenna un ciao, lui a quel posto gli sputa contro e spinge sul gas". It's the raw, direct language of someone who doesn't want to - and maybe doesn't know how to - write any better than this, but it's a language perfectly suited to rock's vocabulary, and that's enough for anyone who loves rock.

"Lambrusco & popcorn" shifts between reality - the "bicchiere di vigna" - and the usual stars-and-stripes dream - the "vassoio di mais già scoppiato". Nothing new under the sun, but track after track Ligabue keeps building his narrative universe, adding topoi, symbols and characters. The song is influenced - by Ligabue's own admission - by the kind of endings found in Simple Minds songs, meaning sections that break away from the main structure, as well as by a clear intent to write a sort of arena-sized refrain that could carry the crowd along at concerts. The desired effect, however, is achieved by the songwriter from Correggio with another track, "Urlando contro il cielo", already finished in 1990 but mysteriously left off the debut album. Much of what Ligabue is able to convey to his audience - through words as much as through music - can be found within this song: a getaway along the Autostrada Adriatica, amid intense sounds and smells; the frustration of days spent counting the hours while waiting for the weekend; the usual invitation to dance on top of the world, to hold each other close before losing yourselves, to draw on the unexpectedly subversive strength of knowing how to make do ("se è un purgatorio è nostro, perlomeno"). "Urlando contro il cielo" is one last burst of energy before the end, a balm for the losers, it's Bruce Springsteen singing in Italian, and it's on your side.

Either way, the high point of Lambrusco coltelli rose & popcorn is without doubt its central section. The songwriter's first - though not only - tribute to Fellini, namely the tune from "Amarcord" whistled in an empty room, serves as the intro to "Sarà un bel souvenir", Ligabue's first dark song, steeped in a nostalgia that's hard to soothe, which seems to anticipate the moods and colors of the following album, Survivors, then and now. At one point in the song, Ligabue compares the emotional force stirred by the sight of a souvenir to a truck barreling along at 120 kilometers an hour. Perhaps it's also the urgency of finding an unlikely rhyme ("un souvenir, formato tir") that leads him to bring a lorry into a love song, but the pairing fits perfectly within Ligabue's prosaic code. The electric guitar solo at the heart of the track is - as the Emilian artist himself has rightly stated - the finest performance of Max Cottafavi's career.

On the following, transitional track, the Monte Cusna choir (from Reggio Emilia) sings the closing lines of the Lord's Prayer in Gregorian chant. It's a device used to introduce Cottafavi's guitar, which tears through the silence like Fontana's blade through a linen canvas, with a boldness straight out of the Guns N' Roses playbook. Ligabue tackles a theme new to him, that of personal freedom and the constraints imposed by the standards set by society and religion, drawing an almost direct parallel with "Proibito" by Litfiba, a single released a few months earlier, which nonetheless differs from Ligabue's prosaic vocabulary through a greater degree of transgression and crudeness.

Lambrusco coltelli rose & popcorn is an album that comes close to matching the quality of its predecessor, although, unlike the latter, it does suffer from a few rare lulls. Going by the numbers and by critical reception, it's not a crowning achievement, but a confirmation - a clear sign that this is something real, not the product of a chance alignment of favorable factors. Or at least, not only that.

The collapse

After the release of the second album, the winds fill the sails of Ligabue and the Clandestino. The Neverending Tour keeps racking up dates, and in nearly every city part of the crowd is left standing outside the venue. "Urlando contro il cielo" has become a huge hit, even without being released as the album's lead single. On Ligabue's right there's still Angelo Carrara, while on his left Claudio Maioli bustles about, mainly tasked with collecting promoters' fees, often under less-than-friendly circumstances. The former doesn't look kindly on the latter and tries to convince Ligabue to get rid of him, but to no avail.

The excitement of the moment pushes Ligabue and the Clandestino to go straight back into the studio for a new record. The first mix is rejected by Wea: the sound is too hard, the tones too dark, and Ligabue's voice, moreover, is buried under the instruments and struggles to come through. As for the balance between voice and instruments, the final result will end up being exactly the opposite: on Survivors, then and now, Ligabue's voice towers over the band, even though the musicians aren't thrilled at the idea of being pushed into the background. The record amounts to a tug-of-war - on a more and less conscious level - between the Clandestino and Ligabue: the former push their own musical tastes to the fore - rougher and more aggressive than their leader's - while the latter, at the producer's insistence, asserts himself with a voice that rises above the rest of the instruments, landing straight in the listener's ear.

The opening of "Ancora in piedi", the album's first track, immediately points the compass west, to the other side of the ocean. In Seattle, between 1990 and 1992, the revisionist wave of grunge reached its peak: "Facelift", "Ten", "Nevermind", "Badmotorfinger" and "Dirt" are just some of the albums that influenced Ligabue and the Clandestino at the time they were recording Survivors, then and now. The consequences are plain to hear. First comes the thick distortion of Cottafavi's guitar, then the full and the empty, setting up Ligabue's voice: hoarse, deep and irresistible; the bass slithers along, the bass drum follows, powerful, then the explosion hits, tambourine jingles and all. It's a shock. It's hard to believe this is the same band, the same musicians, as on the previous albums. Released as the lead single, "Ancora in piedi" would turn out to be something of a flop, much like the album as a whole. On the Primo Maggio stage in Rome, Ligabue would instead play "A.A.A. qualcuno cercasi", which went down far better with the crowd.

The striking artwork of Survivors, then and now, also designed, like the first two, by drummer Gigi Cavalli Cocchi, perfectly captures the soul of the record: dark and theatrical. Ligabue and the Clandestino aren't even shown - their faces are hidden behind animal masks - and on the back cover there's a cast list headed "La filodrammatica Ligabue presenta Sopravvissuti e Sopravviventi - Tragifarsa in due lati". Just below, the performers are listed: Veleno, Professore, Colera, Walter il Mago, Regina, Ramengo, all playing "themselves". They're the usual Ligabue characters, this time slotted into a more defined structure: a sort of concept album.

"Dove fermano i treni" and "Lo zoo è qui" are the toughest tracks on the record: the first - inspired by a story by Pier Vittorio Tondelli, a constant point of reference for Ligabue and, like him, from Correggio - is a grunge number dwelling on the existential struggles of those who, for whatever reason, pass through the non-place par excellence: the train station; the second is a human bestiary that ties back into the album cover and which, in its closing section, raises a wall of guitars and keyboards straight out of The Doors.

On Survivors, then and now, the characters of the "tragifarsa in due lati" are sometimes able to hold the whole stage by themselves. Indeed, while the already-mentioned "Dove fermano i treni" and "Piccola città eterna" - the first song dedicated to Correggio - paint a neorealist panorama in the style of "Bar Mario", "Walter il Mago", "La ballerina del carillon" and "I duri hanno due cuori" each tell the story of a single figure, around whom souls and objects orbit like satellites around their own planet: the tale of the small-town magician, caught between myth and reality; the nightly shifts of a stripper at the club where she works; the bleak, sad night of Veleno, a hair's breadth from suicide. Hidden behind the melodic rock of "I duri hanno due cuori", in particular, is one of the most inspired songs of Ligabue the storyteller ("un quarto alle due e Veleno è seduto sul ponte sul fiume a vedere la pistola affondare, adesso il freddo è reale, è passato alle ossa uscendo per forza dal cuore"). Through the use of spoken word, in the style of "Ballerina e Barracuda", the Emilian songwriter is able to lay out, in rich detail, the story of Veleno, protagonist of an irreversible failure and his own worst enemy, for whom the only thing he can take any comfort in, "in tutto questo perdersi", is having decided, once again, not to take his own life. At home, "l'unico posto in cui possa tornare", his woman is with another man. Knocking on the bedroom door, he'll ask them to keep it down, then lie down on the sofa, worn out by life itself more than by the day just gone. Ligabue turns into a rock song a story that could have come straight out of a Bukowski book, but which he actually wrote with someone from his own streets, his own haunts, his own hometown in mind. It's fair to say that, at this stage of his career, Ligabue has the good taste, and certainly the good sense, to simply stick to what he does best. With the turn of the new millennium, that good sense will gradually fade away.

The album isn't well received, either by critics or by the public. It's too sad, rough, hard-edged and in some ways anti-radio, lacking any impactful singles in its lineup. The accompanying tour draws dismal numbers, partly due to disastrous promotion. Ligabue writes in his autobiography: "Five months ago, on these very same boards I'm sitting on now, we played in Milan in front of twelve thousand people. A few hours ago there were a hundred and twenty. Exactly one hundredth. I'm back to facing the same crowds as my earliest shows with Orazero" ("Una Storia, autobiografia", Luciano Ligabue, Mondadori).

As the years have gone by, Survivors, then and now has been reassessed by both critics and the public, shifting from being seen as the record of Ligabue's failure to being hailed as his masterpiece. Neither claim is true. Survivors, then and now is a record that boasts a strong identity and a sonic and stylistic cohesion that would only resurface, later on, in Happy Birthday Elvis, which really is the masterpiece of Ligabue's career. Many of the songs on Survivors, then and now, while nowhere near anything that could be called "experimental" music, are in a certain sense daring, sketching out sounds that are more complex and adventurous compared to Ligabue's earlier (and later) work. "Quando tocca a te", for instance - rarely performed live - is a martial ballad of hope and courage that, in a surprise twist, ends with the Asioli Jazz Band of Correggio marching alongside Ligabue toward a lighthearted finale. Likewise, the album's real gem, "Ho messo via", brings together, within a blues that turns over like a music box, Cottafavi's bottleneck riffs, the attic-worn piano of Fornaciari - who had stepped in for Marani, plagued by drug addiction - and an intense trumpet solo from Demo Morselli.

As in any theatrical pièce, from the most prestigious productions to the humblest amateur shows, the curtain falls at the end of the performance. The red drape, in this case, is the instrumental "Tema: sopravvissuti e sopravviventi", in which Ligabue opts for the unusual choice of a kazoo to sketch out a liberating melody in the style of Ennio Morricone, which, gently laid over a bed of horns and strings, tears through the dark sky of Survivors, then and now. A glimmer of hope, perhaps, or simply the eternal rest of a soul and a body.

(Non è) la fine del mondo

Appoggiati a me

che se ci dovesse andar male

cadremo insieme

In December 1993, on stage at the second fan club gathering, a semi-depressed Ligabue – weighed down by the failure of Survivors, then and now – announces he wants to take a sabbatical year, away from the spotlight. The promise is broken the following August, when the single "A che ora è la fine del mondo?" comes out. The Emilian songwriter's sound undergoes a clear shift. We're not quite at the iconic sound of Happy Birthday Elvis yet, but the seeds have been planted. The split with Clandestino and with Angelo Carrara – who lost the duel with Claudio Maioli – is total and apparently irreparable. Only Fornaciari remains on keyboards; otherwise, the lineup that records the new single has been completely overhauled and includes, among others, Andrea Braido on guitar.

After the single, unexpectedly, Ligabue also releases a record of eight "scattered fragments", that is, eight tracks (actually six, if you exclude the aforementioned track and "Urlando contro il cielo", reprised here in a live version) already recorded and left off previous albums for various reasons. Ligabue writes in the booklet: "This is not my new record! New records are made with new songs. These, instead, are songs that are (with a couple of exceptions) on average seven or eight years old. I just felt like putting them together."

A che ora è la fine del mondo? (Wea) contains nothing particularly noteworthy, except for the title track – an inspired piece of rap-rock, written in one go on the basis of "It’s The End Of The World As We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" by Rem, after Berlusconi's first electoral victory. "Gringo 94′" sounds fun, and "Search nel cuore" is at the very least peculiar, an acoustic ballad co-written by Ligabue and Fornaciari that would go on to enjoy modest success in acoustic live shows.

Revenge and consecration

Se sotto il cielo

c’è qualcosa di speciale

passerà di qui,

prima o poi

After the crisis, Ligabue goes back to school. He does so in Budrio, in an abandoned elementary school near Correggio. He decides to team up with a new producer, Fabrizio Barbacci, with whom he had already worked on the track "L’han detto anche gli Stones", one of the "scattered fragments" featured on the previous record. The instinct pays off. Ligabue makes it an absolute priority to build a tight-knit band and a stimulating environment to help the creative process along. In no time, the abandoned school in Budrio turns into a rehearsal space that, by night, welcomes artists, onlookers and local "characters". The sounds blend together and echo through the room, but that's no problem; what matters is playing "tight", ideally with musicians from the area: "Roby" Pellati on drums (Casalgrande, Reggio Emilia), "Rigo" Righetti on bass (Modena) and "Mel" Previte on guitar (an adoptive son of Modena). Alongside them is "Capitan" Federico Poggipollini, from Bologna and already a familiar name in the mainstream music scene, having played guitar for Litfiba on "El Diablo" (1990) and "Terremoto" (1993).

Out of the Budrio sessions came an album of fourteen tracks, recorded at Studio Esagono in Rubiera, a hexagonal former Parmesan warehouse located just a few kilometers from the school. With this record, Ligabue becomes a mass phenomenon. In Italy, in the mid-Nineties, almost one Italian in fifty had a copy of Happy Birthday Elvis (Wea) at home, and the reason for its success comes down to three elements: the guitars - the striking chemistry between Mel Previte and Federico Poggipollini - Ligabue's melodic instincts, namely fourteen potential singles out of fourteen tracks, and the superb work of Fabrizio Barbacci. On the cover - which has since become iconic - a smiling child is pictured in black and white, wearing a golden crown. Below, in red lettering, reads Happy Birthday Elvis. At the back of the booklet Ligabue writes: "Heartfelt good luck to Clandestino and to Angelo Carrara, hoping that, as soon as possible, we'll find it easy to remember only the good times".

The opening is a punch in the face: kick drum and dry snare. The distorted guitars of "Vivo morto o X" slither along in syncopation, while the harmonica and Candelo Cabesaz's hidden percussion color the sound, turning it almost into a martial march. The track's coda is a sweeping crescendo that breaks off suddenly, right when the chronic inability to conform, to fit into boxes drawn by someone else, into opinion polls, into a stubborn and far-from-contrary everyday life, turns into the need to hide away in familiar, safe places: a night, the countryside, alone, along the ditches. "Seduti in riva al fosso" is the same old, well-worn Ligabue rhetoric, but the result - including two excellent guitar solos - ranks among the finest in his entire catalogue.

Ligabue's achievement with Happy Birthday Elvis lies in managing to release a record that is both shrewd and superbly produced, yet still authentic, sincere and folkloric. The Esagono, for instance, is such a naive and bucolic studio that recording sessions are often disturbed by the local wildlife, like birdsong from the countryside or the croaking of frogs living in the ditches of the surrounding fields. For Ligabue, that's exactly how it should be. Wherever he goes - and it's the same in his private life - whether it's Graceland, Memphis or the other side of the world, Ligabue always ends up back where he started. It's no coincidence that the little-known intro to his immortal song "Certe notti" is a brief acoustic blues piece, put there to "satisfy" the frogs of the Rubiera ditches, who were so keen to take part in the album's recording sessions. In the final seconds of "Rane a Rubiera blues" a car engine passes by and drowns out the animals' noise. As Ligabue says - or rather, as he repeats for the umpteenth time - it doesn't matter where that car is headed, because sometimes, especially at night, what matters is simply to go, "inseguendo un odorino", to quote Tondelli. "Certe notti" is therefore "Sogni di rock'n'roll" five years on, only astonishingly, simply, more beautiful. The hypnotic riff - devised by Poggipollini, inspired by "Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds" by the Beatles - takes you by the hand and leads you through the summer countryside of Emilia, after dinner, when the air finally turns cool and everything smells different. To fully appreciate it - after all these years and all these listens, willing or not - a tremendous effort is required: to forget it completely, and then listen to it again, one last time.

In the driving rock'n'roll of the title track and the following "La forza della banda", Ligabue issues to everyone his usual invitation to dance - and now also to play - stuffed once again with Anglo-American epic references alongside homegrown Italian ones: Reggio Emilia, the countryside, the parish halls, Liverpool, Memphis, Nashville, Elvis, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin. It's what Ligabue has been saying for five years now, only now he says it differently, and the difference lies in the benefit of experience - by now Ligabue really knows how to make a record - and in having moved past those Eighties that the same Emilian rocker, in "Ancora in piedi", wondered if they would ever end. The sound of Happy Birthday Elvis, in fact, is now straight-up, unfiltered Seventies rock: it's Iggy Pop and Bruce Springsteen without U2 and The Police.

With the already-mentioned "La forza della banda", but above all with "Non dovete badare al cantante", Ligabue tackles a subject new for him, namely the artist's role in society, a theme he would revisit two years later, even more directly, in "Tra palco e realtà". In the closing stretch of the record Ligabue sings: "Non dovete badare al cantante, quello lì che si crede una star, quello lì che si crede uno che lasci il segno, e invece una volta passato chi si volterà?". These are words of disarming sincerity, which sound like an epitaph written for himself after the flop of Survivors, then and now.

The rest of the album is a string of hits that would turn Ligabue into a stage hero, despite his introverted character: the irresistible, driving "I ragazzi sono in giro", which, like "Sarà un bel souvenir", opens with a tribute to Fellini; the ballad "Viva!", in which Ligabue, for the first time, makes the effort to bare himself and recount in the first person his relationship with a woman; and "Quella che non sei", a successful attempt to explore the female world without resorting to the flattery and rhetoric that would come to characterize Ligabue's songs about women in the new millennium.

In "Hai un momento Dio?" and "Il cielo è vuoto o il cielo è pieno" the religious theme returns, already touched on in "Libera nos a malo", but now developed in a more personal and autobiographical way. "Leggero", finally, is the perfect epilogue, a song that made it onto the album at the very last moment, as the doors were closing. Written when mixing was practically finished, the fourteenth track of Happy Birthday Elvis is one of the most poetic of Luciano Ligabue's career, a snapshot in which almost everyone appears: the Band, the cars swaying at night in rest stops, Elvis and his ghosts, Walter the magician, the smell of the ditches, and the boys who "wander" and "roam". Even Kay is there, never named before, but the protagonist of a song that would come out four years later. Feeling light, nothing more - that's what describes Ligabue. At the close, surprisingly, all the other musicians join in, as though celebrating a shared feeling, each to be honored with their own instrument, and ideally, forever. Happy Birthday Elvis, in fact, with the fade-out coda of "Leggero", never really ends - it simply drifts away slowly, like a car at night, through the dark countryside of Emilia. With no outward journey and no return, no destination.

Between the stage, success and reality

In September 1999, Miss Mondo (Wea) was released. With just three months to go before the new millennium, Ligabue had spent the previous four years publishing a book of short stories ("Fuori e dentro il borgo") and releasing "Radiofreccia", a more-than-decent film with a soundtrack of the same name. Ligabue's last artistic gasps of that era also represent the final portraits of a world the Emilian singer-songwriter would stop narrating for good. The instrumental "Radiofreccia" and the single "Ho perso le parole" — respectively the opening and closing tracks of the film — serve as a fitting tombstone for the first phase of Ligabue's career, the one that carried real artistic worth.

Whether due to a lack of ideas, fame, or simply age, Ligabue is no longer able to describe the things that once made him worth listening to: the nights, the fog, the clubs, the small towns and the souls who inhabit them ("ho perso le parole, oppure sono loro che perdono me"). Even when he timidly tries — as with the tepid blues of "E" — the effort proves entirely futile. Having reached this point, it would be better to stop altogether, and Ligabue genuinely considers it, but the fate of many rock stars dictates that, from a certain moment on, even with nothing left to say, something keeps getting said anyway. To his credit, at least Ligabue never turned into a dad dressed as his own son or, worse still, a grandfather dressed as his grandson, and he came to accept the idea of becoming someone else, of growing old, of no longer being able to live out those vices that, as he himself once sang, "non vorresti smettere mai".

As a result, Miss Mondo is the album on which, for the first time, Ligabue truly talks about himself, without putting someone else's story, or his belonging to a generation or a social category, between himself and his audience. Where this had previously happened only rarely and rather timidly ("Ho messo via", "Seduto in riva al fosso" and "Hai un momento Dio?"), here it becomes the norm, and the results are sometimes decent, as in the autobiographical "Da adesso in poi" — a John Hiatt-style piano ballad dedicated to the birth of his first son — and sometimes less so, as in the hollow "Uno dei tanti", which spins on empty, disconnected slogans placed there purely so the average fan can fill them with their own memories and experiences. That this stems from a dry spell of inspiration is something Ligabue himself admits, in the one line of the song that actually carries real meaning: "Non ho un granché da dire, ma quello mi viene bene". And in a way, Ligabue isn't wrong, on either count. Viewed through the mainstream lens of radio and TV exposure, Miss Mondo is in fact an impeccably produced record that will go on to sell more than half a million copies, launched by the single "Si viene e si va" — a dignified enough track that, all things considered, represents the best the album has to offer, alongside the acoustic, orchestral "Kay è stata qui", a song about drug addiction that's masterfully arranged and surprisingly intense, enriched by a 12-string guitar and a string section reminiscent of "Iris" by the Goo Goo Dolls, released the previous year.

The populist wink to the mainstream, in which Ligabue talks about himself with false modesty, could only take the form of a football metaphor, a language practically everyone in Italy understands. In the past, Ligabue had only brushed against the subject of football ("Quando tocca a te" and "Hai un momento Dio?"), but never before had he placed it so firmly at the centre of a song as in "Una vita da mediano". The track sounds almost like a rip-off of "Walkaways" by Counting Crows, a song from "Recovering The Satellites", the very album from which, not by chance, Ligabue would later pull "Angels Of The Silences" for the soundtrack of his second film, "Da zero a dieci".

In the video for "Almeno credo", the third single from the album, TV and showbiz figures such as Giobbe Covatta, Luciana Littizzetto, DJ Ringo and Vanessa Incontrada all make an appearance, proof that by now Ligabue — having shed the waistcoats and shiny jackets — is a full-fledged showbiz star, one who starts talking about himself, dropping the first-person plural in favour of an insistent first-person singular, even if he doesn't always have anything meaningful to say ("Forse mi trovo" and "Sulla mia strada").

Between 1999 and 2002, Ligabue toured Italy with the Banda, filling stadiums and arenas. A few months before the release of his seventh studio album, in February 2002, his second film came out: "Da zero a dieci". The film's setting — Rimini and Riccione wrapped in the melancholy of a vanished youth — also resurfaces in the video for the lead single off How's It Going Out There? (Wea), "Questa è la mia vita", a guitar-forward pop-rock track. By this point Ligabue has fully completed his transformation into a serial producer of radio-friendly singles. It's not that his music hadn't always been direct and built to reach as many people as possible, but by now any sense of communicative urgency underlying the songwriting seems to have evaporated. The only thing that matters is selling records and selling tickets. This leads Ligabue to write songs that are insignificant or, in the worst cases, downright dreadful. "Il campo delle lucciole" is probably the worst song the Emilian singer-songwriter has written in twelve years of career: it's Ligabue copying Ligabue, and badly at that. The vocal line of the verse is mercilessly similar to "Balliamo sul mondo", and the setting, while revisiting themes from early Ligabue, comes across as pathetically empty and impersonal: a summer night with a woman out in the countryside, under the vines.

"Nato per me" and "In pieno rock'n'roll", which sound like leftover songs cut from Happy Birthday Elvis — not by coincidence, Barbacci is once again at the production helm — manage to avoid being even worse only because they're slightly more appealing on a melodic level. The second of the two, moreover — clearly inspired by "Baba O'Riley" by the Who, a song that amounts to a kind of obsession for Ligabue — pays the price of opening up a populist, demagogic thematic vein that, unfortunately, the Ligabue of the new millennium will grow rather fond of: the redemptive power of rock music.

Overall, with How's It Going Out There? Ligabue takes a step beyond the more varied, reflective sound of Miss Mondo, returning to arena rock built for live performance and, for the first time, enriched with electronic touches. Shaking off the burden of production duties — which on the previous album he had once again taken on himself, after the break afforded by Happy Birthday Elvis — he brings in Fabrizio Simoncioni on keyboards (already present on Miss Mondo, but now playing a more decisive role) and, as mentioned above, Fabrizio Barbacci.

The almost Eastern-tinged atmosphere of "Eri bellissima", woven together with genuine autobiographical tension around minor-key tonalities, stands alongside the closing ballad "Chissà se in cielo passano gli Who" and "Tutte le strade portano a te" as a moving last gasp from an artist floored by his own creative void. The latter, in particular, sounds surprisingly sincere and features an ambitious arrangement that recalls the romantic tension of "Camera con vista sul deserto", while adding to it a more autobiographical touch, an actual chorus, and — thanks to Poggipollini's creative input — textures that come close to sounding shoegaze.

Beyond the Records

I'm here for love,

to fill your sea with a bucket

with a paper boat

that refuses to sink