Daniele Silvestri - From Hendecasyllables to Rap

Daniele Silvestri, a Roman, is one of the most interesting singer-songwriters of the new Italian scene. Starting out with albums marked by strong social commitment, over the years he has shifted toward more melancholic, intimate songs, without however shunning the infectious joy of "Salirò", the song he presented at Sanremo, which earned him success with the wider public. His 2002 album, "Unò Duè", confirms Silvestri's qualities as a songwriter, starting right from the closing track: the poignant "Di padre in figlio", dedicated to an unborn son and to a father recently passed away. Social themes return in tracks like "Il mio nemico" ("Il mio nemico non ha divisa, ama le armi ma non le usa, nella fondina tiene le carte Visa e quando uccide non chiede scusa") or "Manifesto". At other times, it's the ballad form that takes over, as in "Sabbia e sandali", or energetic rock ("Mi interessa"). But the urge to escape takes shape in the radiant "Salirò" (accompanied at Sanremo by Fabio Ferri's curious and fortunate dance routine). "Unò, Dué" is a collage of styles and influences, filtered through a worldview that is both ironic and enchanted. Before the album's release, Silverio Novelli interviewed Daniele Silvestri at his home in Rome. Here is the account of that meeting.

Daniele Silvestri, musician-lyricist-songwriter-singer for a generation of thirty-something Romans who grew up sharing the adventure of the early days, hanging out at a venue (it's actually called Il Locale, and it's on Vicolo del Fico 3) where music was, and still is, made freely, in the spirit of enjoying being together. Silvestri, Max Gazzè, Alex Britti, Niccolò Fabi, Nek and so on. A nice thing, but I only find this out later, talking to Silvestri himself: "Il Locale isn't a new Folkstudio: different times, and today there's no political project behind it. Here there's just friendship, and that's it". As soon as we sit down in RCA's spartan studios in Rome, I ask him whether the cultured intelligence that oozes from the music and lyrics of his four albums is also the fruit of a particular intellectual ecosystem. Silvestri confirms it: "When, on instinct, I thanked my father from the stage at the last Sanremo festival, I did it because I felt that the award given to 'Aria' for best lyrics was something I had to share with the person who taught me to love reading and writing. I grew up in a family that loved reading, walls crammed with books, a house full of theatre because my father, a novelist, started out writing for the stage. I remember myself as a kid - perhaps the only one among so many adults - amused and fascinated at all those crowded after-dinner gatherings, family friends who worked in the world of theatre. My mother, on the other hand, sang jazz in Bologna, more or less until I was born. Then, over time, she moved on to something else, becoming the director of a study-travel agency, and that's at the root of my Anglophile cultural upbringing (years of study holidays in England)".

Daniele likes to bounce ideas off his father Alberto: "I like him to hear my stuff even while it's still a work in progress". Talking about his erratic working method ("when I'm on tour, I basically suspend all writing activity; when I catch my breath between concerts, I focus and get to work, I write, cross out, throw away, rewrite - never on a computer, always pen and paper, even making use of travel time between shows, if it happens"), Daniele recounts that one of his signature songs, much loved by fans, "Cohiba", dedicated to the figure and myth of Che Guevara, written ("in his head") while driving from Rome to Milan, got a decisive push from a suggestion made by his father: "He suggested I play on the homophony between the nickname 'Che' and the Italian expression 'c'è' [there is]".

Daniele Silvestri, cultured by upbringing ("on my nightstand I'd put Italo Calvino, all of him, for his ability to draw you into self-contained imaginary worlds; for the same reason, plenty of science fiction, which I'd sum up in the figure of Asimov; Dostoevsky, inevitably 'The Idiot'; the theatre of Tom Stoppard, which distills the theatre of the absurd and brings it all the way to the present, all the way to cinema; García Márquez"), shows that he has dissolved his literary culture into the play of rhymes, assonances, puns and alliterations that characterize his set-to-music verses. Only in Paolo Conte can one find an equally strenuous attention to lexical precision combined with a refined choice of meter, as in these lines with feminine rhyme: “Se siete schiavi di una tombola/ stracolma di tesori che distribuisce a vanvera/ e vi coccola l’idea di impadronirvi della vincita/ vivere di rendita” ("Pozzo dei desideri"), (“correre nel traffico/ mettersi il soprabito/ respirare microbi/ perdersi nei vicoli/ inciampare negli ostacoli/ affidarsi a degli oroscopi/ arrabbiarsi con le nuvole/ evitare le pozzanghere” ("Marzo 3039").

"My poetry reading matters, sure," he says, "but so do the years of rap that pushed me to restock my terminological warehouse in search of convincing lexical and conceptual solutions. It's an advantage for songwriting, which escapes the usual repetitive round of words, and it's an advantage for communication."

Silvestri is a postmodern encyclopedia of song: rock, pop, rap, funk, reggae, house, ballads, Paolo Conte, Battisti, Caputo, plenty of Beatles, psychedelia, classical music... Every album is a mobile continuum with no fixed center. And what about the lyrics? Quotation and irony, the typical lenses of the disenchanted postmodern eye: “E adesso siediti/ su quella seggiola/ lo so che parlo come le canzoni/ ma così perdoni le volgarità: e adesso spogliati/ come sai fare tu…”, ""sono la figlia del dottore amica delle tre civette/ guarda c'è un comò"" ("Amarsi cantando"), "il fuoco, Baglioni mi sembra funzionino poco con te" ("Il flamenco della doccia"), "Però ti dicono: "le donne sono tante! / come i Negroni, no? milioni di miliardi" ("L'Y 10 bordeaux"), "ci piace Daniele, Battisti, Lorenzo, le urla/ di Prince, i Police" ("Le cose in comune").

Silvestri plays it down, but rightly refuses to be seen as a living "compendium" of Italian and international song of the last thirty years. "I express myself by communicating through different forms. On one hand, it's a necessity I respond to. On the other, I won't deny that, over time, I'd like to aim for more homogeneous solutions, more cohesive albums. But I want to stress that I'm immersed in my own time. Take 'blob' - as an artistic tendency, rather than as collage in itself. Blob means drawing on the shared contemporary imagination, in frenetic evolution and marked by the presence of the strongest medium, TV, as a linguistic reservoir to tap into for one's own creative paths. Starting from a set phrase, even a musical one (the distorted trumpet that opens the old news bulletin theme in 'Paolo' immediately comes to mind, ed.), a shared image, lets me communicate knowing I've evoked a collective heritage." We've reached the crucial point: a sharp sensitivity for communication, played out through winks at the mass languages of the present, a powerful value capable of uniting different generations under the banner of intelligent songwriting.

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