Angela Baraldi - Unfaithful to the Line

On January 24th, the new album by Angela Baraldi was released. It's titled “3021”: eight tracks written between 2022 and 2023 by the Bolognese singer-songwriter herself, together with Federico Fantuz, for Francesco De Gregori's record label, Caravan. Distribution is handled by Sony Music Italy. In 2024 Angela opened the shows on De Gregori's summer tour: it was he who encouraged her to finish the creative process of the album, which had already been underway for some time. The common thread running through “3021” is sound. Angela has stated that it's the opposite of a concept album: “I imagined the sound of the spheres, the planets and deep space, and we tried to reproduce it using guitars, bass, drums and a few synths. I wanted to experiment with simplicity. Unlike the sounds, in the lyrics, on the other hand, I looked for the ground, the human element, to set against the deep space of the galaxies”. Here's what else she told us…

Angela, lately you've been on stage with Telmo Pievani and Gianni Maroccolo's show, “Nomadic-Canto per la biodiversità”. It's a work of tremendous artistic and civic value, where scientific research into the migrations of living beings comes together with a deeply poetic, deeply human dimension. With your voice you tell of shipwrecks, of deaths, of those who had to move because they had needs and desires.

That's the essence of the show. It's a show against fear, because it makes you aware of a mechanism that you can't change, which is also our salvation. It's not a matter of your political views, whether you're right-wing or left-wing: it just is, the same way you can't be against the rain or against the wind. We should consider the whole globe a single country. That way we'd probably manage to have a completely different view of how things stand; migrations will happen because there will be parts of the Earth that it will no longer be possible to live in. Because the climate won't allow it.

Did working on this show influence the composition of your album, which is full of comparisons between pure, distant planets and very earthly things? Starting with the title track "3021", where you ask yourself what will remain, a thousand years from now, of the love messages and desperate requests we write today on our cell phones.

Actually, the songs came first. But I can tell you that this show helped me understand this layering in my work, because things sometimes have a synchronicity of their own. I found myself putting together a show that also speaks, in a way, of the "3021" from the song. You know, sometimes things creep in without your awareness; sometimes awareness is actually a brake, in the sense that you decide you want to make a certain kind of work and so you discard certain things, because they don't fit your original project. It's always good to let yourself be shaped by your experiences.

Throughout your career you've collaborated with many different souls of Csi. On "Nomadic-Canto per la biodiversità" there's Gianni Maroccolo, and singing alongside you is Andrea Chimenti, who was produced by the Consorzio Produttori Indipendenti. Even earlier, there were Massimo Zamboni and Giorgio Canali: three different souls of what was once a great band. I love all three of them, so I wanted to ask you how these encounters came about and what differences there are between these personalities: Maroccolo, Canali and Zamboni.

Yes, so let's go in chronological order. I'll tell you that Giorgio and Massimo were almost contemporaries, though Massimo Zamboni came first, because a theatre director brought us together — he wanted us to do something for an evening at his theatre, the Teatri di Vita in Bologna. After that, it turned into a great friendship and a deeply felt collaboration. Massimo suggested we do Cccp: I had an enormous amount of fun with that. The first show was extraordinary, we had a truly unexpected success, and after that a collaboration began. As for Canali, I met him because there was the Festival della Fotografia in Reggio Emilia. It was an anniversary of "Unknown Pleasures" by Joy Division, and Peter Hook was actually there in Reggio Emilia too, so they asked me to do a set inspired by Joy Division, performing their songs. So I contacted Canali, and I have to say his reply was electrifying — he said: "Shall we do a live set with no bass and no drums?" I mean, imagine Joy Division without bass and drums... I answered: "Are you crazy, do you really want to strip me bare?" And he said: "Look, if we take away the very thing that defines them, we're forced into a reinterpretation." And that was a really intelligent point he made. Giorgio is a fantastic producer, so I put my trust in his vision, and what came out of it was a truly beautiful set. We played a huge number of shows and had great success with it, you know? Sometimes these operations can turn out clumsy.

I met Gianni because after the Cccp experience it felt natural to call on artists like Francesco Magnelli, Gianni Maroccolo... After all, Csi wrote some wonderful songs. I adore Cccp, but having had the good fortune to start with Cccp and then move on to their evolution was really interesting; probably if I'd gone straight into the Csi's work, I wouldn't have had that same confidence, because those are different compositions, and there a complexity comes into play where instinct alone isn't enough anymore. Also because as a young girl I was a Cccp fan, I actually saw them in their original lineup, they were in my DNA, I owned their records... But they were very structured, very refined; in my opinion, as a rock band they had an incredible power of sound, and there was a very complex organization happening on stage.

Unfortunately I missed Cccp at the time, and Csi too...

Just think, I never saw Csi live. Cccp, yes. I have to say that the first time I saw Massimo and Giovanni, they hadn't even recorded "Paranoid Emilia" yet. They had just come back from Berlin, and you could already tell from a distance that they were a band.

Speaking of Berlin, after the 2017 publication of Massimo Zamboni's book "Nessuna voce dentro-Un'estate a Berlin Ovest", you took part in a show in which, together with Massimo, you perform pieces tied to the musical imagery of Berlin. Your reading of Massimo Zamboni's "Città imperiale" is deeply moving. Were you ever in Berlin during that period? Do you remember any experience you had there? And is there a city that, in your view, still offers some spark of creativity, of exchange of experiences and ideas, given that cities are becoming increasingly impersonal these days because of gentrification?

I was in Berlin when the Wall was still standing. It was 1987, and I went there because there was this very particular event, the anniversary of the founding of the city of Berlin, its 750th anniversary. So they called in the leading creative minds of the moment, among whom was this very dear friend of mine — the same person who introduced me to Lucio Dalla — Massimo Osti. One of the few people I've ever met quite like him... he's the one who invented CP Company and Stone Island. He had this beautiful exhibition at the Reichstag, and I had contributed to the soundtrack of the fashion show, because he'd put together this event in a very original way. So there were no models, there were these performers from a Berlin theatre, there was original music, and so he called on everyone who had contributed to the project. So I only saw Berlin on that one occasion. And I never went back. It's a city that struck me deeply. I was also in East Berlin, and I saw these realities so close together and yet so different. I'm not surprised so many musical projects were born there, because it was a city that moved you profoundly, and it's probably still very interesting now. But times have changed. People want to travel, to spend little. My own city, Bologna, has changed enormously because of this low-cost flights business. It's right that everyone wants to travel, but the result is that cities change in this way, and not always for the better.

You live between Bologna and Rome, to which the new album's track "Bellezza dov'è" is dedicated. Here too, it's a place of contrasts and very different people, between statues of angels, homeless people, seats of power and soup kitchens for the poor. It's also, among other things, Francesco De Gregori's favourite song on the album. I remember when you sang "A piedi nudi", at the 1993 Sanremo Festival: that was a rebellious song, but with a light-hearted tone, in which you told the story of someone looking for their own path, away from the crowd, from clichés, someone who talked to herself and listened to herself. And in relation to that, on the latest album there's a song, "Cosmonauti", born from a dream in which Lucio Dalla invites you to travel through the cosmos without being afraid. "You won't crash, you won't crash!" he told you in the dream. "Cosmonauti" contains some beautiful lines: "Ancora pesco scarpe rotte (Angela ride) sbaglio amici, e ancora rido di un rottame a cui ho creduto/e a volte i giorni son felici." Compared to that girl, how do you see yourself now? I really love this cheeky, playful side of you!

Well, yes (laughs). I mean, deep down I'm still that same person. Then the world changes, and I change along with it. But there are things about me that haven't changed, and I don't hold that against myself, I'm fine being this way. Mistakes aren't really mistakes, they're experiences. And I still love the wrecks I've loved, and maybe I still go looking for them. There's no such thing as perfection — as Sylvia Plath said, perfection doesn't exist; it's foolish to look for it, it's fine perhaps to strive toward it, but I think if you ever find it, you die. So I'm fine as I am. Lucio used to scold me sometimes for the people I chose to spend time with, and he told me it was important to choose carefully. And he was right, he was absolutely right about those things. But I realize there are mistakes I keep making, maybe because they're not really mistakes, they're just features of our nature.

On your previous album "Tornano sempre", from 2017, there's a song that always touches my heart every time I hear it: it's called "Tutti a casa" and refers to the tragedy of Federico Aldrovandi. It's dedicated "to all the young lives dismissed from the world by the violence of the law" and to the fears of the new millennium tied to teenagers. When it came out, it struck me deeply, and it strikes me even more now that I've heard the song "Corvi" from the latest album. The crows are the self-harming thoughts of teenagers who deliberately cut themselves: you've always shown great sensitivity toward them. The lyrics say: "Lungo il perimetro della tua stanza/ Una trincea forse non è abbastanza". You've said: "I was like that too, and especially in this historical moment, it's a subject that's very close to my heart". What would you say to a fifteen-year-old who, after the pandemic, struggles to express their emotions and who lives in a country where protesting can be considered a crime?

Well, that song, for instance, I wrote it with Giorgio Canali, you know! I realized it was a song for Aldrovandi because the first time I sang it was at the concert dedicated to him. And what makes me sad is that these things keep happening, so I'd say we need to be aware that certain things don't change, but that we can change, and we can make revolutions within ourselves, and we must never, ever stop protesting. Unfortunately, the younger generations don't have, close to them, what we had: generations who went out to protest and who actually achieved something through those protests. The perception you have now is that it's pointless, and that's sad, very sad. But it isn't true, because otherwise they wouldn't be making laws to ban it. That's what I would say to a fifteen-year-old.

The album "3021" — Angela told us — isn't meant to climb the charts, it doesn't have the sound you hear on the radio right now; it was born out of a desire to get back to playing live. Having sung, since the very start of her career, alongside the likes of Lucio Dalla and Francesco De Gregori, as well as at the Sanremo Festival, she's used to performing in big venues in front of large audiences; yet now her music is made for clubs and small venues, which unfortunately fell into crisis during the pandemic and are now fewer and fewer. In any case, we can't wait to hear "3021" performed live by this elusive, free-spirited artist, who still sings "barefoot", just as she did all those years ago.

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