Gerardo Attanasio - Songs from Afar

Gerardo Attanasio is one of the best-kept secrets of Italian singer-songwriting. After a tentative debut, with the recent “I Canti dell’Ontano” the Neapolitan singer-songwriter has finally managed to put on record the deepest essence of his inspiration, delivering a run of songs that certainly deserve to be discovered by an ever wider audience.

I meet Gerardo in Castellammare di Stabia, on a strangely sultry Sunday afternoon in November. After a coffee, a long walk along the seafront and a stimulating chat…

So, Gerardo, “I Canti dell’Ontano”, your second work, came out a few months ago now, and among the Italian records released in 2014 it's definitely the one that has won me over the most. I even find myself whistling its songs from time to time. How is the record doing? What kind of reactions have you had?

I'm glad you think so. The record came out on June 12th and we've played it quite a bit between Naples and its province, with a few forays into Umbria and Rome. It's moving slowly and steadily. After some lucky shows in Naples, someone offered to handle local booking on my behalf, which is a good result for me. The audience's reactions, when we manage to build the show the way it was conceived, are very positive. So far there have been few chances to do that, which is why I'm touring more with just voice and guitar. The songs lose their outfit, but the work on the lyrics is probably appreciated more. In the arrangements it was deliberately hidden away, so as not to always put the voice in the foreground, as singer-songwriter tradition dictates.

How did you get into music?

More than music, I got into song, which by definition is a cross-disciplinary art. It's like centaurs or mermaids: neither purely poetry, nor purely music. Like many, I started at thirteen with a guitar to strum, and paper and pen to rewrite the world.

How do your songs come about?

The luckiest ones come all at once, lyrics and music, and by now sometimes even the arrangement. The others, and they're the majority, need help through work. Generally I jot down ideas, drafts, atmospheres, and I keep everything. When the right moment comes, I select and assess whether it's worth pursuing or not.

Which artists have inspired you the most?

I'll avoid naming too many names. I'll just say I've been influenced by minstrels. Then I had to make a virtue of necessity in arranging and producing myself. Over the years I learned to use tools of the trade that weren't naturally mine, also thanks to Peppe De Angelis, who co-produced the second record. In his Monopattino recording studio in Sorrento we re-recorded some of the drum parts and mixed four tracks. I had to broaden my musical horizons by listening to lots of records across the most disparate genres, and the idea of personally taking care of aspects I would normally have entrusted to others started to become fun, so much so that I don't know if I could do without it today. For every production aspect I have reference records and artists. Generally I love the irresponsible ones: those who didn't limit themselves to doing things “properly”. Then I prefer songs with a musical language that can even be elementary, but true and powerful, and a certain dose of humanity in the lyrics, ideally leaning toward the poetic. More Homer than Bach.

Your first work was called “Vivere Lento”. How does it differ from your new work?

The first is a record made more or less properly. The second is an irresponsible record.

“Vivere lento” is a record that, in my view, captures you in a transitional phase. In short, the impression is of an artist still searching for his voice, coming to terms with his influences. Do you agree?

Fully. Thanks for "artist," but along with "masterpiece" it's a word I rarely use. Beyond what you've picked up on, there's a desire — a legitimate one, I think, for a twenty-six-year-old — to be accessible to as many people as possible. It's a record that doesn't take any major risks, and one that's also fairly well made technically, but it's uneven in the writing. In some spots I still find it unlistenable, while in others I get satisfaction from finding the seeds of things that are growing in other projects.

Compared to "Vivere lento", "I Canti dell'Ontano" shows a much more careful, studied approach, almost as if in the meantime the recording studio has become a real "instrument" for you...

"Vivere lento" is a record made with a good deal of care, partly because it was the first one, and both I and the engineer who worked on it wanted to get a good result, done properly. "I Canti" is paradoxically more off-the-cuff, because it was recorded mostly in my little home studio, and there I had the chance to take as much time as I wanted to discover things without worrying about bleeding myself dry financially. So the record was, besides a clear expressive urgency, also a great testing ground for learning as much as possible about the craft. Then, in a lot of moments I had a well-prepared playmate who never stopped me from going a bit crazy, Peppe, with unconventional mic placements, creative use of plug-ins for purposes other than the ones they were built for, sampling, recording marbles being thrown on the floor, so many things — we really had a blast with it... in fact, running the studio yourself really is just like writing, except you use sounds instead of words. That was my approach, and one of the people who inspired it is Brian Eno.

By the way, I know that just these days "Vivere lento" has won an award...

Yes. In the past it's received other recognitions too. They're nice, but sometimes they can be pretty relative.

Is "slow" life the one that lets you best savor things and people?

Slow life is the one in sync with the rhythms of the earth. "Vivere lento" was meant as a wish for me and for whoever would come to love the songs: the wish that everyone would find their own rhythm without letting themselves be overwhelmed by haste. That slowness then turned into a curse, seeing as it took me five years to put out another record...

How much of Castellammare di Stabia, the town where you currently live, is there in your songs?

Well, to start with, I have my project studio in Castellammare, Blue Bell — I don't actually live there, but I've spent much more time there than anywhere else so far. There's a huge amount of Castellammare, Gragnano and the surrounding area in "I canti dell'Ontano" especially. Hills, sea, mountains: all places I go to constantly and know very well. Here everything feels like home, regardless of the town, village or hamlet... My imagination took shape in these places, under this light. I've never been someone who dreamed of being elsewhere. I've always loved this place, and I've been lucky enough to be able to stay: it's only natural that I write about it, it's what I know best.

How did the title of your new record come about?

From an obsession I've carried with me since childhood games. The alder [ontano] is a tree I learned to recognize pretty quickly among these hills. There's a play on words between the name of the tree and the adverb "lontano" [far away]. Each song plays out a different kind of distance. The sound evokes a tangled wood.

Did you personally handle the artwork for the new record?

No, but I was very hands-on in giving direction to the people who worked on it. The artwork is vaguely impressionistic. Nothing is sharp, clearly in focus... everything is wrapped in mist. Just like the sounds.

Want to talk a bit about the songs on the second record? Is there a common thread holding them together?

I'm telling different kinds of distance: from childhood, from desires, distance between the sexes, a longing for far-off places, for escaping small-town life, or reaching a "far away" that isn't a physical place through love in its broadest sense, distance from the joys of sex in "L'istinto", whose protagonist is drawn from Pavese; bold platonic love affairs via chat, distance from the bourgeois class that, more or less, we all belong to by now, but which we're all ready to criticize without really understanding what that implies... in short, various distances, right up to the final, supreme one... which is distance from life itself: death. It's a work that carries the mark of a widespread sense of precariousness. But there's no shortage of redemption, of light among the branches. Not once do the words "crisis," "precarity" or the like show up in the lyrics. It reflects the historical moment in an oblique way.

One of the tracks that struck me most, both musically and lyrically, is "I bambini perbene". A song that moves between west-coast enchantment and hypnotic swoon…

It's a very old song, already present on the second 2006 demo "In due ore", in a minimal version: voice, guitar, Farfisa. On the album, though, I think whatever west-coast feel you pick up on is down to the rhythm section: acoustic guitar, bass and drums. For the forest of electric guitars, on the other hand, Peppe De Angelis and I drew more on the undergrowth of European psychedelia and kraut-rock, or on bands closer to us in time like Bardo Pond. The final bottleneck solo, dirty and expressive, is by Antonio Ostuni and is typically blues in origin. Overall it's a song that reflects the reluctance of a curious twenty-year-old to only keep good company; I wrote it in one go... it was more than anything an outburst against certain dynamics I felt distant from.

Which albums and books most influenced the writing of "I Canti dell'Ontano"?

Too many to name. I come to this album with my whole life experience behind it, which includes countless listens and readings, each of which influenced it in some way. The most obvious ones are Borges and Pavese, but there's much more. Going back to the first answer, the idea of "hiding" the voice, where needed, comes from "Anima Latina". "I Canti" maybe stems from teenage listens to baroque albums like "Ok Computer" and "Mellon Collie…", but over the years I've gone through so much stuff that the effort I made was to find my own voice, equidistant from every influence, however basic or misguided it might be.

Tell us a bit about your creative process… how do you work?

Every song needs its own method to come into being. I have to believe that, to always feel like I'm discovering something new. My preferred technique is to follow the music and let it suggest the words. Normally you write the song first, then arrange it, and finally go into the studio to record. For this album it wasn't like that. Some songs I'd already had for many years. Others were born in my project studio while working on pre-productions: a sound would suggest a word and vice versa, everything grew together. Everything has its own precise reason for being there, a reason that isn't geometric.

With reference to Pavese and your future projects, how do you conceive the relationship between literature and the song form?

There's a randomness that becomes substance. It's a long journey, we'd never get to the end of it… Suffice it to say that I feed on literature, it's inevitable that I mix it with life and spit it back out in the form of a song. In the future I'd like to touch on Catullo, Whitman, Dickinson, the Latin Americans, and, why not, some still-underground friend... it'll all depend on the music.

Underground friend?

Some poet not yet sanctioned by official culture, some contemporary who might interest me.

Tell us some particular anecdote tied to the gestation and recording of "I Canti dell'Ontano".

A day spent recording "Marilù" live at Phonotype in Naples, the studio that made the history of Neapolitan song: from Sergio Bruni to Bennato, just to name two. Its acoustic setup, in terms of materials and the type of recording room, is akin to studios like Abbey Road, Officine Meccaniche, or even Rome's Trafalgar, where I got to play in September. These aren't modern studios equipped with the materials used today, and in fact even the smell of them is something else entirely. A leap back in time... For those of us who love this world, it wasn't just recording a song, but a real educational field trip to a temple of music. As a sound engineer still learning the ropes, it was hugely useful for understanding how legendary microphones behave, ones you don't get many chances to encounter every day. A real gem. I wanted a grand piano to try recording everyone together without a click track, and Peppe took me to see it to check whether their instrument would work. As soon as I set foot in there, I decided: this was an experience worth having. Another great day was the one spent at the church of San Benedetto in Angri recording the medieval drummers of the Ardinghi borough, whom you can hear at one point in "Mistral" and in the album's closing coda, the outro of "Umor Vitreo". There we had fun recording the guys led by Mr. Vincenzo Del Sorbo, who was extremely kind. Then, what can I say, many nights spent working late and sleeping in my studio on makeshift beds. Working at the most absurd hours. So much joy, so many headaches, so many technical problems in handling such a rich album with the means of a small project studio... so many memories.

How, in your view, has the role of the singer-songwriter changed over these years?

I think singer-songwriting has been somewhat flattened by the need to communicate to distracted, hurried people. Everything is fast. The tone too conversational, not very artistic, less and less poetry. Far more than a singer-songwriter, what's needed today is an entertainer, an anesthetic. The height of disobedience is a "fuck off". Fair enough, but it's no use to me. On average people look for technical quality more than personality. By personality I obviously don't mean looks or attitude. I'd sign off on that view, as would Mauro Pagani. From a musical standpoint there's a decline in melody, it's ever harder to come up with beautiful ones that stick, because deep down people think all the best ones have already been written: so they seek refuge in harmony, rhythm, virtuosity or a nice sound, but the songs are missing. I prefer the generation of Conte, De André, Dalla, Guccini, Dylan, the elder Buckley, Gabriel, I adore Nick Cave… I find them more intense than us, and wherever I can I try to draw inspiration from them. I believe the ideal role of the singer-songwriter remains frozen in what the insights of electric Dylan suggested: it shouldn't reflect its own time, but aspire to speak to the human heart: to be universal.

What will your next moves be?

To play as much as possible around Italy. From a creative point of view I know exactly where I'm heading, but I'd rather not talk about it now.

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