Roberto Vecchioni - Songs for the children of the world

We reach Roberto Vecchioni by phone after a long courtship via email. In reality, he's very warm and forthcoming, and it's clear he's eager to talk: about himself, his story, dreams, feelings, memories, Italian music. About everything, except politics. So we leave the constitutional referendum, which concluded overnight with a resounding victory for No, to the raucous orgy of commentary that has been raging for hours everywhere, on TV, online and on social media. The Professor, who has nonetheless thrown himself into politics many times – not least his campaigning for Giuliano Pisapia as mayor of Milan in 2011 – seems to have grown tired of being misunderstood and dragged into things. And besides, he's too absorbed in his new project: an album titled "Songs for the Children", which joins his book "La vita che si ama" to form a box set into which he has poured much of his heart. And you can tell right away, from the emotion in his voice as he answers the first question…

Professor Vecchioni, how did the idea for these "Songs for the Children" come about?
The book came out last year, containing only the letters to my children and the lyrics of the songs dedicated to them. So I decided to add the songs themselves, and while I was at it, to re-record and rearrange them, since they'd been lost to time or were little known. Then I added two new, unreleased tracks, in which I, in turn, as a son, address my mother. Reliving them through memory unleashed a whole range of emotions in me, far stronger than the ones I'd felt when I first sang them: joys, sorrows, passions, fears, dreams… all the thoughts that have passed through my mind in these 40 years of life with my children. It's an album addressed to all fathers, and also to those who don't have children but think about other people's children, about the young people of the world. These are songs for all the children of the world - mine are no different from them.

Will you be bringing them on tour too?
Yes, I already played a few dates in October and November, but I'll be back on the road again from mid-January. And that's exactly what we'll be talking about: what will happen to our children, our grandchildren, what we leave them (and what we don't). In short, it's the future of the world, a huge subject. I'm no philosopher or sociologist, I approach it as a bit of a poetaster, through emotions. But I believe emotions matter a great deal. That's another reason why this is an album I care about so much.

After all, you've always had a special vantage point on young people, thanks to your work teaching in high schools and universities…
Yes, I still teach, at the University of Pavia. The thing I've seen more of than anything else in my life is school desks! And then, of course, there are the students. I've spent ages with them, I've watched generations go by, ways of thinking change… I believe teaching doesn't just mean handing out facts. Teaching is Socratic: you have to give young people the tools to figure things out for themselves. There's a scientific kind of communication, which is useful in practice, but then there's a need for an evocative kind of communication, the kind that can save us: art, poetry, beauty.

I have great faith in young people today. They need a spark, a starting point, and then they take off, they throw themselves into it like madmen.

I've always liked the way you address younger generations, with great trust, without that sense of superiority typical, unfortunately, of some members of your generation - those who "lived through '68" and accuse today's young people of no longer nurturing those ideals. You, on the other hand, have always said the opposite, starting with that moving song "Sogna ragazzo sogna".
Of course, I have great faith in young people today. They need a spark, a starting point, and then they take off. You just have to help them, because they're fragile. When you offer them some encouragement, they throw themselves into it like madmen, and they're brilliant at it. "Sogna ragazzo sogna" is an all-encompassing song, which I wrote for my students when I retired from teaching. It contains everything: the invitation to never lose heart, to be with others, to feel the beauty of poetry, to look ahead, to live through both joys and sorrows, to cling tightly to life. Because, as the great Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet once said, man has an extraordinary sense of life: even when planting an olive tree in old age, he thinks he'll be able to watch it grow, he never entertains the idea of dying. You must always hold on to the idea of living and try to be happy. To live is to be happy.

Beware of being swept away by the wave of memories and the fear of the future: you have to live vertical time.

Here we are: happiness is exactly the central theme of your book, "La vita che si ama". You write that you want it "like a fever", and then: "Happiness is not an acute angle of life, or an incalculable logarithm, or the squaring of the circle: happiness is geometry itself". Can you explain that a bit more?
I think we have a narrow idea of happiness, we think it only coincides with the moments when we're at peace or things are going well. But happiness isn't that small a thing, it's everything else too: you have to take adversity and turn it on its head; you have to take joys and savor them fully, otherwise you stop being able to enjoy them at all. You have to take it all.

Even in as bleak a period as the one we're living through now?
Yes, it's a bleak time, but we've lived through many such times throughout human history. We have to get past it, because we'll never be perfect, nor as happy as we imagine we should be. In fact, maybe even Adam and Eve were too happy in paradise, and that's why they chose a more eventful life instead…

In the book you also talk about a "vertical time" to set against horizontal time…
Vertical time is hard to attain, it takes real courage. You have to step outside of time and not let yourself be swept up in its current. If we let ourselves be overwhelmed by the pain of memories and the fear of the future, we're done for. Instead, we have to try to think that we carry all of time within us, in our soul. It's not just what flows by today: memories must always stay alive, we shouldn't long for them wistfully; and we must keep imagining the future, so as to feel it almost as if it were already present. In short, we have to stack past, present and future within our consciousness, rather than watching them flow by horizontally.

The Milan of Lights over San Siro was like a small town, where everyone knew everyone else. Today, it's a futuristic, cosmopolitan metropolis, one that gives you a sense of security.

As a Roman, I fell in love with Milan thanks to your “Lights over San Siro”. What do you remember of that Milan, and how far is it from the Milan of today?
It's miles away. That was a pioneering Milan, almost a small town: everyone more or less knew each other, there were so many meeting places. We'd gather in little groups, planning the future. You'd run into all sorts of people, even a bit of the underworld! Cabarets, comedy, jazz were all thriving. Things that have now disappeared or become niche. But today's Milan isn't any less beautiful, it still is, just in a different way: it's modernised enormously, it's fast, quick-moving. A futuristic city, a cosmopolitan metropolis that gives you security, gives you certainties.

Shame you can't say the same about Rome…
Rome is beautiful and unique in the world, but perhaps it pays for that beauty with a certain amount of chaos. It's a city I love, and it pains me that it's in this state.

What's your relationship, instead, with your classic albums – from “Parabola” to “The man who gambles the sky on dice”, from “Elisir” to “Samarcanda”? How does it feel to listen to them again today?
I still love them all just the same, but I've changed a lot since then. I've learned so much music and so many different ways of making music. Back then I was just someone writing ballads, Italian-style songs. Then I learned to do other things, from jazz to symphonic music. I learned from Puccini how arias are made, from the great American jazz musicians how to distort things and how you can go off the beat if you want to. And I learned a great deal from Italian singer-songwriters, especially De André, Guccini, Dalla: how to tackle a story, how to develop a lyric… In practice, I've spent my whole life learning and teaching.

Sanremo was a burst of popular passion. It helped me get out of my niche.

And then in 2011 you found yourself on the Sanremo stage and even won that competition, apparently so far removed from your way of relating to music. How did you end up at the Ariston?
I wasn't pushed into it, it was an experience I wanted, and wanted with conviction. I liked the idea of celebrating the popular song, alongside the more vaguely refined and intelligent kind. And I wanted to widen the circle of people who knew me. I've always been a theatre man, a niche artist. And so instead a special kind of recognition exploded. A burst of popular passion! However tacky and contrived it can sometimes be, the Sanremo Festival remains a great moment in Italian culture. Going there and winning with a fairly noble song, like "Call Me Love Again", was quite an achievement, an immense joy.

And so you also became the only singer-songwriter to have won the Premio Tenco, Sanremo and Festivalbar all together. So much for those who've always accused you of being a radical-chic!
Well, yes, after all I've always written songs for everyone. Now I can just as easily go and play to five or six thousand people in a square as to a thousand in a theatre. And as a writer too I've won three very different literary prizes, the Pavese, the Montale and the Elsa Morante.

Guccini, Dalla, De André weren't just great singer-songwriters, they were also gurus, maîtres à penser. Their records were journeys in which we all found ourselves.

You belong to a special generation of singer-songwriters, that of the 60s and 70s, who, besides giving us classic albums, knew how to describe and denounce Italian society. Musical tastes aside, don't you think today's singer-songwriters have lost that centrality?
Yes, that was a special generation. As well as writing great songs, the likes of Guccini, Dalla, De André were gurus, maîtres à penser. They shaped opinion, in other words, and the public followed what they wrote. Today there are still good singer-songwriters, there's some beautiful rap, not just for the young, there are some really interesting progressive bands (but he won't name any, because “the moment you name one, you get shot down on Twitter”, ed.). Perhaps the way music is consumed has changed too: the album is no longer a concept, a journey, an incredible story that everyone can see themselves in. All that matters now is the beauty of a song, of a moment, maybe stacked on top of another one in a playlist. So in the end it's harder for anything to become “historic”.

Speaking of classic singer-songwriters, I once happened to write a book about Francesco De Gregori, and your handout on “Linguaggio in canzone” for the “Forme della poesia per musica” course at the University of Turin was a great help to me. In your view, how has the vocabulary of Italian songs changed in recent years?
All the figures of thought in songwriting have been considerably simplified. Metaphors today are very easy, stories with characters and narrators are much rarer. You talk about a feeling and stretch it out for four minutes. Generally it's love, but it could also be hate, freedom, and so on. There aren't several stories packed into it, it's always just a single story, a single moment, a single account, and that takes away some of the depth. It wasn't like that in the 70s, just think of Dalla and “How Deep Is the Sea”: how many things were packed into that song! So the vocabulary is simpler, but not unsophisticated, sometimes it can even be very beautiful. In the piece I wrote about De Gregori and Mogol, I pointed out exactly the essential differences between a medial vocabulary, which lands immediately, and a trans-medial one, which lands once you've thought about it a little. But that doesn't mean a medial vocabulary is bad, sometimes it can even be more beautiful. Calvino used to say you have to be very realist to write surrealism. And that's how it is: abstraction can't be thrown in at random, it has to make sense.

I taught my children dreams, and a sense of beauty. But they're not enough to face life.

To close, let's go back to your children, Francesca, Carolina, Arrigo and Edoardo: what's their relationship with your songs? And what kind of father are you to them?
My daughters adore my songs, they always come to see me, even if they prefer to stay a little in the background. My sons, on the other hand, maybe out of a desire to play devil's advocate, tease me quite often, sometimes they snub me, but I know they like my stuff too, deep down. As for me, I don't think I've been a great father. I haven't managed to explain to my children the many tools you need to fight your way through this jungle that is life. Maybe a bit childishly, I gave them dreams, a sense of beauty, things that in the end are useless…

Come on, those are hugely important! (we laugh)
Fair enough, they tell me too that they haven't been useless. After all, dreams and beauty aren't everyday things, they're perhaps a bit different from a lot of other kids, and they find themselves surrounded by a fair amount of phoniness, by a lot of people with very poor taste. But they hold their own well, especially since all four of them are very intelligent. They take after their mother!

Extended version of an interview originally published in the newspaper "Leggo"

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