Francobeat - Play Is the New Reality

Franco Naddei, singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, avid reader, rediscoverer of the world of childhood, on the release of his third album “Radici”: impressions and memories, aesthetics and thoughts. A snapshot of a lucid artist in the making.

Hi Franco, a quick question just to put you at ease: what have you been listening to lately?

Things I've listened to recently: Devo, Portishead, Talk Talk, Velvet Undergrond. Things I've "discovered" recently: Daughter, Low, Le Femme, Lali Puna.

Let's get into your world, or rather into your “Vedobeat”, your 2006 debut. In my view it's something of a manifesto: on one hand the aesthetics of Beat literature, on the other the style of Merseybeat, and on yet another the electronic beat, all held together by a collage technique, not to mention your spoken interludes and monologues. Beyond that broad analysis, what were your actual intentions?

If you're asking about "actual intentions," that just shows how confused that record really was! In fact it was the start of a path on which I still had to work out how to move within what I'd later define as "library pop." I had recently read "Mondo beat" published by Stampa alternativa, and in that book I found a story - that of the Italian beat movement in the most intellectual sense of the word - in which I saw myself almost mirrored. On one side there was the instinctiveness of the long-haired kids firing off protest poetry in the manner of Kerouac and Ginsberg, trying to shake up a dozy, economic-boom-era Italy; on the other there were the great thinkers who, in my view, played the same role but from the "learned" side: I heard Ennio Flaiano and Marcello Marchesi as beat in their own way. I put myself somewhere in between, with my songs weaving a web of words into a kind of "radio drama-document" about the search for freedom of expression. Maybe it was all too much put together, but that's how it came out. It was one way among others to tell a story from the past through the eyes and songs of today. On "Vedobeat" I played around, messing with definitions of freedom and their effects. If in the '60s simply having long hair was a shouted act of freedom of expression, what kind of freedom do we need today? Then I wondered whether those long-haired kids hadn't turned into bank clerks or undersecretaries, what was left of the game and the revolution, what they'd become "once they grew up."

That's precisely the record that introduces the theme of play, of regression to childhood used as a lens to describe the present-day condition of "grown-ups" - why do you think it's so effective?

I find that play, like error, is a fundamental element in the creative process. And generally speaking, knowing how to find the playful side of things is essential to living well. When I make a record I want to have fun, to play with sounds and words and the sounds of words. If I'm enjoying myself, I naturally create songs, and I'm being truthful. Sitting down to hunt for pedals, poems, stories, synthesizers with strange sounds, turning chords at random, messing about the way kids do in their bedrooms. And it's in that space that total freedom is celebrated, along with curiosity, sincerity, and the beauty found in microscopic events, like being happy that a block tower with an absurd architecture manages to stand up. I wouldn't really call it a lens, more a direct way of seeing things, taking them less seriously, playing with them, letting yourself be amazed even as an adult. That's what's "effective": being amazed by everything, as if it were always new and magical, the way it happens for children, as long as the wonder is genuine.

That brings us to "Mondo fantastico," your second work and perhaps your artistic high point, in which you fully embrace the legendary, unforgettable childhood imagination of Gianni Rodari. In practice you set to music a "choral book" (published by Artebambini, ed.), in an innovative idea of multimediality. Tell us a bit about how you conceived the album's structure, its overall composition.

In my wanderings in search of inspiration, I had a flash of insight when I came across an old, thick Rodari book. Before that, my lyrics had even been dismissed as nonsensical rather than surreal, so I needed to find a way to make it clear that the real subject was the ability to create worlds and stories with words, without limits and with authority. Rodari is considered a surrealist in every sense, even though he's best known for applying that literary vein to children's literature. Having made peace with my limits as a writer, I decided to let Rodari speak for me. Rodari's body of work is vast, and I let chance do almost all the choosing, as suggested to me by "Grammatica della fantasia" by the same author from Omegna. Some of the nursery rhymes seemed to speak to me, to the grown-up me, but in the tone of a child. After writing the first tracks, I also wanted to insert excerpts from that same "Grammatica," precisely to give a jolt to the dormant adult imagination that might encounter this record. Making a track that explains how to build a limerick in the style of Cecchetto's "Gioca Jouer," or inserting a spoken word piece to clarify the concept of the "fantastic binomial," was a way of offering a few elements to immediately put adult imagination to the test, and to play with some little tricks to train the imagination - which never hurts.

When the work was almost complete, I thought I didn't want to relegate it to the standard CD-only package - I would have liked it to be a kind of audiobook. So I talked about the project with Vanessa Sorrentino, who writes and runs creative writing workshops with children. Since we couldn't publish Rodari's own texts, we thought of tossing the ball to emerging writers, giving them as a theme any prompt drawn from the "Grammatica," and asking them to write something original that could in turn be illustrated with an equally original image. In effect, it meant sharing the Rodari lesson with several artists and seeing its effects. Everyone let themselves be swept up by that wave, and it seemed to me a lovely way to celebrate imagination and its possibilities.

Besides Rodari, where do the lyrics come from - you cite luminaries of children's literature like Wallon, Propp and Vygotsky, but also visionaries like Tim Burton. And what about the strictly musical side, which embraces an oblique, imaginative approach even more than "Vedobeat," along with splendid chamber arrangements - where does that come from?

Well, first of all, thanks for the "splendid"! I had worn out my copy of the "Grammatica," so I dove into the bibliography Rodari himself suggested. I felt I had found the book that could give me clues to unravel the disappearance of childhood poetry in adulthood. I did some further research to get inside the knots I wanted to untangle, simply by writing songs; I let myself get carried away by curiosity, going deeper into the technical questions of how thoughts form and change over time and depending on the conditions one lives in. In that sense, Wallon was an extraordinarily interesting read, so much so that at first I wanted him to already be part of "Mondo fantastico." Luckily I didn't, but that doesn't mean I won't in the future! With Propp, I had started working on an experimental contemporary-electronic music project, and that will probably be the third chapter of this hypothetical trilogy of imagination that these "fantastic" records are turning into. In any case, thanks to "Vedobeat" I got to know Flaiano, Marchesi, Bianciardi, Achille Campanile, and I discovered Il Sorpasso by Dino Risi, "Blow Up" by Antonioni, and others. Rodari too gave me discoveries that I devoured hungrily. It's a lovely way to approach working on an album of simple songs.

Musically, at the time I was working with horn arrangements on another project (John de Leo's first solo album); I had them in my ears, and they seemed to me very fairy-tale-like sounds. I had a sound in mind and I knew where I could "plunder" words from. I let the record be half written and arranged, and half improvised through live recording sessions with friends who wanted to play along with me. I had played at being the composer, but I also wanted to play by performing live with my little friends. Throughout all this I had the great responsibility of respecting the lyrics while also making it felt that I was playing with my own element: music. I love writing melodies, I've played piano since I was a kid, then I started strumming the guitar, and I've worked with electronics forever. I always try to steer my exploration toward something pop. I don't do it on purpose, it just comes out that way. I don't even know music that well enough to claim any great writing skills, but luckily I manage to make something that strikes me as original precisely because of that. If "Vedobeat" was basically conceived for a classic bass-guitar-drums trio, "Mondo fantastico" gave me the chance to play with more timbres, without setting myself any limits. And thanks to everyone who played on the record, I managed to fulfill a kind of dream. Playing with real notes!

On a side note, you've become part of Massimiliano “Moro” Morini's Silent Revolution, a project that yielded a little gem of Italian folk-pop like “Home Pastorals”. How did that encounter come about? What do you feel is akin between your work and Moro's more traditional (and English-language) songwriting?

Moro and I have known each other for more than 20 years. As kids we used to play together, doing Depeche Mode covers in Italian, and I was the “band leader”. After many years we met again, and I followed step by step his return to music, from a pure hobby to a more mature body of work. He's already made 3 records, and I've been glad to take part in all of them, if only to pay him back for all the grief I gave him in our youth! Joking aside, Moro writes very well in English, and his way of composing and playing is extremely natural and sincere, as well as damn poppy! I have a recording studio and over the years I've dabbled in a lot of genres, and luckily I've also learned things I could offer Moro in terms of sound and arrangements. We have a lot of fun now, both in the studio and live. Incidentally, “Home Pastorals” came out almost as a joke: we were only supposed to do 5 tracks for the TV show “Ortoemezzo”, which aired on Laeffe last winter, but every day he'd bring me more songs he was unsure about, and I'd tell him: “Are you crazy? Let's do it!”. That kept multiplying until we ended up with the tracks that made the record!

Let's talk about your new record, “Radici”. First of all, unpack the title for us.

That one's easy! It's simply the name of the residence where my “matti” live, the ones who wrote the lyrics for the record (I call them matti with affection, and they call themselves that too!). It has nothing to do with the illustrious predecessor (“Radici”, the fourth album by Francesco Guccini, for reference). I just wanted it to be clear where everything came from and who it belonged to. Originally I was going to call it after a quote from Wallon (“L’inverosimile ipotesi del pensiero magico”), but it felt pretentious and forced. The record is theirs, so I gave it their name.

The fact that the word evokes something else is a nice coincidence, just as it's paradoxical that that very place represents, for its residents, a distancing from their true roots, from their real home. They know that “Le radici” isn't their real home, and this awareness comes through in the record with unexpected sincerity, even though in the end they try to make it enough.

The concept behind the work: how does it differ from your previous records? What should or shouldn't listeners expect?

It's a pop record, with strange lyrics, that's all. Except often the lyrics, strange as they are, aren't strange at all. Thanks to these lyrics, I didn't feel the need to chase some elaborate harmonic or sonic research. I've always composed with whatever came to hand. It was also the first time I found myself recording things on the spot, sometimes even late at night coming home from a gig somewhere, just guitar and the computer's crappy built-in mic to capture it and that was it.

Working with the matti was a long process, it took two years to get them to write lyrics that could be set to music without me touching a single comma. Over time they sent me a lot of writing, and the beautiful thing was finding myself mentioned in a lyric, or being recognized as the one who gets them talking in “little verses” and singing. I felt present, and useful. And they gave me some formidable lyrics that really hit poetic peaks.

I've often wondered about today's singer-songwriters, about the authenticity of their unease as much as their happiness, their disenchantment, their view of love and of themselves. I find that what my matti wrote has nothing to envy in any lyrics out there right now — if anything, I think a lot of songwriters could draw inspiration from it. I felt like I was in a kind of state of grace, which I then decided to share, as usual, with the musician friends I'm hanging around with these days. Every time it was a kind of magic where, out of nothing, a phrase and a chord (usually the first one that comes into your head!) turn into a song. And the compositional method was nothing more than letting go, without overthinking it.

In the end I found myself with 11 tracks that pull no punches; there's a lucid, raw vision of mental distress and some vague hint of hope that “things will change”. What I did musically is meant to respect and mirror the lyrics they gave me, even in the darkest moments.

There's also a strong electronic presence, and it's electronic music in every sense: the played kind, coming from synths and computers, the subtler kind found in the production, and finally the “concrete” kind made up of the many sardonic spoken fragments that help give your songs an almost choral quality. What's the deeper meaning of this choice, in your view?

My real sonic bread and butter is electronic music, it always has been. For the past two records I've been part of Santo Barbaro, a project with an articulate, exploratory electronic path, always in service of the words and the song. In that project I rediscovered a kind of authority in electronic sound that I didn't have in Francobeat. I didn't want to use cheesy beat-style keyboards, I wanted the machines to have a pulse similar to that of Santo Barbaro and my solo electronic work. Then obviously everything gets a bit bastardized, maybe because I love David Byrne, so a bit of eclecticism always slips in! I should say that in the overall economy of the record I wanted the matti to be present as much as possible, even through their own sounds. I went to see them with some gadgets of mine to record them and manipulate them in real time, using their voices as sonic material to insert into the record. To organize that material I got help from Valeria Caputo, an electronic composer among other things, who assembled my samples into a composition made entirely of voices, an idea that actually came from the matti themselves (“this is my voice”).

Another undeniable achievement of the record is bringing back into the light the elusive John De Leo, who lends his voice to the closing track, “Che cambino le cose” (alongside Sacri Cuori's Antonio Gramentieri). What's the deeper reason behind this collaboration?

Ahahah… John's alive and well, and he's actually about to release a new record any day now, didn't you know? John and I are old friends, we've done a lot of live shows together, and I've featured on a lot of his records too. We admire each other a great deal, but we'd never managed to do anything together for a project of mine. I played him a few tracks precisely because we'd been seeing each other while he was working on his own record, and he rightly picked the one where I hadn't even thought of having him involved. He got me to change part of the song and added his precious harmonies, making a track that's maybe among my favorites on the record shine even brighter. A wonderful lyric.

It's also really nice that he ended up meeting Sacri Cuori, just as in other tracks musicians who didn't know each other crossed paths (Giuseppe Righini with Moro), or came together in unexpected combinations (Giacomo Toni and Santo Barbaro doing a track that's a bit '60s).

What do you expect from this album in terms of your audience? Where is Francobeat heading?

I don't think I expect anything in particular, I just hope the album gets heard by as many people as possible, and that these lyrics switch on a few lightbulbs. Anyone who knows me knows that when I make a record I'm not just making songs, I also want to say something, without being a nuisance about it, obviously.

As Francobeat, for now I'm just watching and thinking about taking this album and its message on the road. Meeting "i matti" happened thanks to a "Mondo fantastico" concert, maybe I'll have other inspiring encounters while playing "Radici". I think I've made a particularly good record, thanks above all to the lyrics written by my dear matti. Before making another one under this name, I'll need to think it over carefully!

More pragmatically, how is the record promotion going? Any upcoming shows?

So far the promotional machine is just getting started. I'm curious to see how critics react, and how the first listens land with the audience. The initial feedback seemed very enthusiastic, so fingers crossed! In the meantime, there are some shows on the horizon through December. For now they're in the Romagna area, then I'm hoping to tour around Italy a bit. There's a teaser out there, an animated piece made by the talented Christof Brehme, who will also direct the video for "Pillole", out in November. In short, you'll be hearing from us!

Thanks for everything, and see you next time, Franco!

Ride the wave of great music

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