Amor Fou - A Little Pop Fable

Amor Fou are proving to be one of the most interesting and stimulating outfits on the contemporary Italian music scene. A double live date a few weeks apart at Sottoscala Nove in Latina (first as Amor Fou, then as Casador) is the perfect opportunity to cover a range of topics with Alessandro Raina, the band's singer and songwriter.

Alessandro, I'd like to start with your personal path. It's a path built on constant reinvention, which over the last ten years has led you to take on different guises in projects with very different approaches (Giardini di Mirò, Noorda, Amor Fou) and to hide behind a pseudonym (Casador) even when presenting solo work.

Don't you think that presenting yourself under different names (a path also followed, in some ways, by Prince a few years back, ed.) risks disorienting most of the audience, who are often easily distracted, making it harder for them to properly follow your artistic trajectory?

Actually, in my entire "career" the only real change has been dropping my real name in favor of Casador.

I took part as a guest in projects that weren't my own (Giardini di Mirò and Noorda), whereas for my solo work I always used my real name, before opting for Casador — a choice also driven by the desire to present the project on more than just a national level.

Amor Fou is the first band I'm part of not as a guest but as a founder. So if you think about it, the changes aren't really that many. The fact is I started making music only a few years ago, as a guest, and only later did I feel I could put forward projects that were 100% my own. That Italian audiences are often distracted and confused is — sadly — a certainty, but I believe that over time, if a musician's path and their particular stylistic signature manage to assert themselves, audiences don't take long to spot it. Whether they grow attached to it is another matter entirely.

I'm very intrigued by your story: a sophisticated music journalist who manages to fulfill the dream of becoming part of one of the most interesting bands in Italian alt-rock. A bit like the fan who becomes the protagonist, no?

It really is an unusual story, but I think having had very different life experiences, not solely focused on music, allowed me to arrive at it with more clarity, and above all with a wealth of stories and inspirations to draw on — something that, unfortunately, I've rarely found within the music world itself.

Collaborating with Giardini di Mirò was an experience somewhere between a dream vacation and... an internship, but on a musical level I didn't really have the chance to pick up that many skills, partly because of the band's intense schedule. Still, it was a great prologue and a real privilege. It allowed me to figure out what approach best suited my own way of understanding music, and to get to know both the strengths and the flaws of the Italian scene.

Differences of opinion with the rest of Giardini di Miró pushed you toward the more "songwriterly" project that is Amor Fou. A kind of supergroup, wouldn't you say?

The differences with Giardini di Miró boil down to the ordinary difficulties a very tight-knit band runs into when it has to question itself after so many years, faced with a new member who's just taking his first steps. What was missing was experience, and there wasn't time to grow together and hone a common language, but the results were still very important, both for me and for them.

Amor Fou isn't a supergroup, but a project built on a shared idea of what music is and what it can mean, with the participation — then and now — of capable and willing artists.

After the first record, which was very well received by critics, there was an immediate change affecting half the line-up. Can you explain the reasons behind it?

The reasons boil down to a total divergence of premises — not so much about the project itself, but about what meaning to give to making music and to putting forward certain content. This, combined with a total lack of clarity and motivation on the part of some members, inevitably led to having to rethink the group from the ground up, or rather to transform it into something much more in keeping with its founding premises. Those premises were always crystal clear to both me and Leziero, but not everyone showed the motivation and sense of identification with them — elements without which a project like this has no reason to exist.

In a world dominated by grab-and-go listening and personalized iPod playlists, making an overly demanding concept album would seem like suicide. And yet, on "The Season of the Cannibal", Amor Fou had the nerve to start from one of the most controversial events in recent Italian history (the Piazza Fontana massacre) and survey forty years of the country's social life across a pretty complex record. Do you think the gamble paid off? Tell us about the genesis of Amor Fou's debut.

Actually, I think every record — all the more so if it's in the singer-songwriter vein — should contain an underlying concept developed through songs and lyrics. Unfortunately, that's a tendency that's been fading in Italy, giving way to stylistic and mannered elements, or overshadowed by the figure of the performer, which is still dominant.

Aside from not believing we have musical or vocal qualities sufficient in themselves to justify making records as an exclusive occupation, we've always seen ourselves as people bound together by a shared urgency to translate an imaginary world, one where stories, people and events we've all confronted — as artists, as chroniclers, or as ordinary citizens — come together.

At the center there's always the human dimension, but life doesn't end there: losing touch with reality, or building one shaped around your own persona, takes a monstrous imaginative capacity, and frankly I think very few people in history have had it.

Amor Fou's first record came together by piecing together a long, tormented love story set against emblematic chapters in our country's history. The new record is a genuine catalogue of real and equally emblematic characters. And so will whatever comes after that.

There's clearly a remarkable attention to lyrics in your songwriting — even some of the song titles (I'm thinking of "Venti giorni di una donna famosa" or "Ore 10 parla un misogino") are wonderfully original.

They're titles drawn from films, books, newspapers — basically everything we feed on to shape the content and the reasons behind the songs we put out.

What are the main differences you've found, having experienced two major projects like Giardini di Miró and Amor Fou from the inside? For instance, does the approach to writing songs show significant differences?

Giardini di Miró are a group of friends deeply tied to their own local scene, struck by the emergence of a musical movement, post-rock, into which various influences and suggestions were "diluted" over time — but which built its reputation by doing a very good job of replaying that movement's own stylistic tropes. Changes have come very gradually and cautiously, mainly because it's not a band made up of highly trained musicians, nor ones particularly interested in becoming so, but of devotees of great music with very clear ideas about what their project should or shouldn't be — which has real virtues, but in the long run can also be limiting.

Amor Fou was born out of the collaboration between an ex-journalist/writer who was still artistically quite green and musicians of tremendous caliber, highly skilled and versatile at every level, from performance to production.

From that point of view, talking, composing, recording and playing with people like Luca Saporiti or Leziero Rescigno was a huge learning experience for me, and a constant push to keep improving and refining my style.

Does your interest in the foreign market remain a priority? Do you plan to keep pursuing it? How do you think it can be reconciled with the choice of singing in Italian?

Indeed, it makes no sense to think of approaching the foreign market with a project sung in Italian. That's why I started the Casador project, with all the patience needed to let it grow and make it "presentable" in a scene as dense, chaotic and rich in quality as the international one.

Will Amor Fou keep becoming an increasingly electric and increasingly less electronic creature?

Amor Fou will keep dressing the imagery of its songs in a coherent way, whatever stylistic choice that requires. We've never worried about belonging to any particular scene - our influences are extremely wide, and when you have a clear idea of what you want to achieve, that's definitely a great source of inspiration. So electronics will come back if and when we feel it's necessary. In the case of the first album it was almost a sine qua non condition, and that definitely limited the record's expressiveness.

In your career you've shared major stages with artists in a higher league, such as Wilco and Lali Puna. Tell us an anecdote or two.

There are plenty of anecdotes, but nothing particularly unusual, at least when it comes to the artists you mention. If anything, what strikes you most about them is how absolutely down to earth they are. The low-key attitude, the calm with which they approach their work and respect the role of whoever shares the stage with them, even without an ounce of their talent or anything close to their level of popularity. I was certainly lucky to learn a great deal by talking with them, but above all by closely observing artists like Jeff Tweedy, Micah P. Hinson, Shannon Wright or Glen Johnson, and I can say the same about far less famous Italian artists too.

I consider Jeff Tweedy's band the most important name on the international alt-rock scene of the early new millennium. I'm sure you can properly convey to us the emotion of being in their presence. I saw them in Florence a few months ago, and unfortunately at the end of the show they bolted straight off. Always a rather graceless attitude, don't you think? What does it cost to stop and sign ten autographs for the fans who follow you so devotedly and who, after all, guarantee your artistic survival?

I can picture the situation, and for as little as I could grasp spending a day with them, I think they're simply very reserved people who consider the huge gift they give the audience during the two hours of the show - not to mention the records, obviously - to be enough. I fully understand our Latin fetishism for that kind of thing, but you have to take different sensibilities into account.

Tweedy, beyond the privilege inherent in making a living from music, remains a man clearly worn down by life, and I believe music represents both a salvation and a daily challenge for him. Travelling around the world 12 months a year drains a huge amount of energy, mental energy above all, and delivering hours of music at that level, practically every night, is already an incredible gift in itself. It would be far worse if Lady Gaga, who lives off popularity before musical substance, denied herself to her fans.

Tweedy and co. put the music above everything else, and that's fine, especially if it sends you home with the privilege of having heard the best band on the planet. I can tell you that ten minutes after the Turin show, Wilco were all sitting behind a Mac chatting with their wives and children, thousands of miles away, and maybe that's exactly what allows them to focus completely on the music while they're up there playing it. Still, they're sober, shy, extremely approachable people (which isn't a given among musicians, far from it) and respectful of their audience, to whom they give a great deal beyond autographs.

A little Nick Hornby-style game: the five records you've had on heavy rotation lately, plus the title of the book Alessandro Raina has on his nightstand.

"Heroes" by David Bowie, "Magical Mystery Tour" by the Beatles, a compilation by Sergio Endrigo, "No Cities Left", the Dears' stunning debut, "Kid A" by Radiohead. The next records I'm planning to dig into are the ones by Grizzly Bear, XX and Langhorne Slim.

I don't listen to much, but if I like a record I won't let go of it for at least two months, and I don't think that attitude will ever change. Music demands patience, at least for me, but it always pays you back. In such a chaotic time, though, I have little time to focus on reading... the last book I tackled was a collection of recipes drawn from Charlie Chaplin's films (cooking is my main passion) and a biography of Marcello Mastroianni.

Let's add a bit of spice: let's talk about other Italian bands, focusing on names that are by now well established. What do you think of Marlene Kuntz's "artsy turn"? And Giovanni Lindo Ferretti's "conversion"? And Afterhours at Sanremo? And the Giardini di Mirò, who in 2009 scored a film with musical sequences that are deadly boring?

The provocation is topical, but I think it's impossible for me — assuming anyone cares about my opinion — to weigh in on those terms! My acid phase is over, trust me (laughs heartily, ed.).

Jokes aside, I think Marlene Kuntz have always been a bit pretentious in an artsy way, and that's also part of why they remain a unique band on our music scene, beyond the ups and downs in their output. You can hear it in the lyrics and in Cristiano Godano's attitude, which seems to me to have stayed intact. Conversion is an entirely interior and private moment in a person's path, however controversial it might seem in the case of an artist who has often voiced very radical political and cultural opinions. I can say, though, that it certainly didn't need good old Giovanni Lindo Ferretti to tell us that Joseph Ratzinger is a theologian of tremendous stature, but I realize that in a certain context these are very uncomfortable subjects, and that religion itself is too often experienced in an extreme, unconstructive way, both by believers and by non-believers. Afterhours went to Sanremo in a very honest way, with a song that doesn't strike me as the best of their output, but I think that was part of a legitimate path toward getting their music — which reached the wider public too late, and maybe not even during Manuel's most creative phase — out to a broader audience.

Bands like Giardini di Miró are generally the kind you either love or find deadly boring — or maybe there are different ways of being boring, and if that's what they're doing, they're doing it with great style. Either way, they're phenomenal artists with an enviable discography.

I'd also like to dwell on other events that I find pressing and controversial on the alternative music scene — for instance, I was really struck by Moltheni's recent decision to quit the scene. And I'm still amazed at the sudden, peremptory rise to prominence of musical projects that, had they been conceived in an era capable of producing more authoritative music criticism and a more demanding audience, would never have gotten past the demo columns.

Which bands on the national circuit are Amor Fou most in touch with? And which bands (foreign ones too) would you like to collaborate with in the future?

We're not in touch with any particular band or artist, but we have great respect for, and whenever it happens we fondly compare notes with, artists who share our path and the stages we play on, from Paolo Benvegnù to Moltheni, from Massimo Volume to Alessandro Grazian. Abroad there are hundreds of artists and bands we'd love to work with — the list is really too long — but I can tell you that a few ideas are already brewing.

The name of an up-and-coming Italian band worth mentioning?

It's not easy for me to name one, for reasons I won't go into here, but I hope I'll soon be proven wrong. I really admire the voice of Thony, an Italian-Polish singer-songwriter based in Rome, and I expect a lot from News For Lulu, led by Nicola Crivelli (already known from Green Like July), while it seems to me the media have already caught on to Albanopower, the project of my friend Lorenzo Urciullo, from whom great things will come sooner or later, including as a solo artist singing in Italian.

In any case, these are projects that should have positioned themselves to break onto the international scene a long time ago, and that in Italy unfortunately will never get much recognition, starting with the language they use. If it even makes sense to call her "emerging," I'd add that Barbara Petrina is a great asset to Italian musical research.

Is Alessandro Raina still keeping his passion for journalism alive? And in that context, how do you view the proliferation of webzines that tend to take space away from print media?

The proliferation of digital media in itself exponentially expands the potential for spreading information and content that's largely, or entirely, irrelevant. That's a consequence of the fact that more and more people have the means to communicate, and feel they should do so regardless of the merit of what they're saying and regardless of whether they've spent enough time finding the right way to say it. I've stopped writing and I don't think I'll go back to it, but writing remains my main passion, and one way or another I'll keep expressing it.

Not unlike the now-eternal debate between downloading and the pleasure of owning a physical record, wouldn't you say? On the subject of "digital distribution," by the way, Amor Fou and Casador proved to be ahead of the curve in Italy…

We've always set ourselves the goal of preserving the quality of the material we put out, regardless of the format in which it reaches the audience. That's perhaps made us less prolific, but it's let us focus as much as possible on the final product. We put enormous care into every element, musical and otherwise, and then it's up to the audience to decide whether to experience our music at 5%, 60% or 100% — that is, whether to also own the physical objects through which we present it.

The obligatory question: what will Amor Fou do when they grow up?

They'll go into debt to make records and rack up earnings to cover part of that very debt. So they'll never get to take advantage of any tax amnesty.

Ride the wave of great music

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