Marco Parente - An album as long as a day

When I walk into the dressing room for the interview, Parente is alone, wearing a pensive look and scribbling something in a well-worn notebook. Before starting, Marco clears his throat twice. I figure he might have a bit of a cold, and decide to “trim” a few questions.

Is it true that Patty Pravo covered “Farfalla Pensante”?!

Marco nods, satisfied.

Not only that: she recorded it before I did. It came out first on her album and then on mine.

Are you happy with her version?

Well… She was capable of making that butterfly fly, and I heard it in the demos, when it was still in a primordial state. Then she bent it to fit the production of her album, so, in my opinion, the song lost a lot of its quality. I… I don't know, I wasn't particularly satisfied, I have to say.

At least did you get something out of it financially?

Marco shakes his head.

Not even that?! How sad!

I don't think it's selling all that much anymore.

It was nice because it was satisfying. It wasn't a song written for others; then, through Manuel (Agnelli, who duetted with Pravo and Joe on the version of “Pensiero Stupendo” on La Crus's album “Crocevia”, ed.), before I started working on the album, this opportunity came up and she chose that track. It made me very happy, though, considering who wrote it and what I expected, I can't say it's a fantastic version. In fact, it stayed under the radar as a song, even on her album. Clearly there were others that convinced her more.

Let's move on to some banal questions: “ Neve Ridens “, a project involving the release of two albums a few months apart. Why? Two reasons came to my mind: the first is to have more chances at the MTV Awards, and the other is to have more chances at the Mercury Prize.

He bursts out laughing. I hadn't considered those chances…

Would you ask Quentin Tarantino why he split “Kill Bill” in two?

He explained it: he said it was too long.

…Because I had so much material, among other things very dense, dense with things to say, things to play. There was a strong urgency, two years of collecting songs and another two particularly intense years, and so, naturally, some songs were… urgent, but I didn't want to give up almost any of them, so the idea came to me to split them into two installments.

They're two albums that are absolutely connected, even by the title (“Neve Ridens” the first and “Neve Ridens” the second, ed.), and that's meant to link them, but it gave me the chance to dig deeper into a theme, to make a certain kind of selection of songs, to release the first work and then do the exact opposite: they're two sides of the same coin.

Is the second album already ready?

More than three quarters of it: it's already recorded and mixed. It was all recorded at the same time. The idea of doing two albums came about gradually: I didn't set out with that idea in mind.

I find "Neve Ridens" to be a very streamlined album, at times even "dark". Many were expecting something extremely grandiose and orchestral, given your recent shows and the live album ("L'attuale jungla" from 2004, recorded together with Mirko Guerrini's Millenium Bugs' Orchestra, ed.).

Exactly: right after the orchestra, the desire was to "clean up", you know, to make some space and, so to speak, find myself again, perhaps with the musicians who had followed the work — which is actually the band I'm playing with tonight, the one that followed the whole album and will be with me for the entire tour. The urge to come back down to just a few people. I have to say, I don't know if this happens to other people too, but it happens to me constantly: when you finish an album you get this urge to go back and ask yourself, "Wait, how did this song used to sound?" and you want to play it again trying to find how it was at the start. Here it was done precisely by searching for an album.

So was it easier to handle the whole arranging process with the band, and the recording? It all came very naturally, and even today, all the confirmations I have — my own, intimate and personal ones — are exactly this, and it gives me a lot of confidence, because things clicked into place, they evolved, and it's as if I had unconsciously thought certain things through and, without even realizing it, they had evolved and fallen into place. That's how it happened with this album — which is actually two albums — but the moment we got together in the rehearsal room it was incredibly fast, maybe because, I repeat, it's the distillation of so many collaborations I've had over the years, and these musicians represent, for me, the distillation of that distillation, both humanly and artistically.

You've been playing together for many years, so I imagine there's also a strong bond between you.

Exactly.

"Un disco lungo un giorno".

It was an incredible experience! He smiles

Shall we explain what it was about?

You explain it! He laughs.

Forget it! At most, when I transcribe the interview, I'll just copy-paste from the press release... (so instead, I'll sum it up: five shows all held on September 20th of last year. In order: on the radio with an acoustic set; in the underpass of Florence's Santa Maria Novella station, with an unauthorized set; in a bookshop, to interview themselves and play a book; in an art gallery exhibiting works by Tullio Parente, Marco's father, reworked for the occasion by visual artist Giovanni Antignane; and the window of a high-fashion store. Ed... pant pant)

We managed to play the whole album across the various stops... Certain places were chosen, and we went out to meet those places.

We started from the radio with an introduction of a track from the second album, which will be part of the "Il sorriso animale" trilogy (only the track "Il sorriso animale III" is featured on "Neve Ridens", ed.), then the host spoke — I didn't want to talk — and I played one track.

Then the station underpass, where we basically busked: it was just me and the guitarist, and we played in front of a record store. Really street-style...

Then at the Feltrinelli bookshop: I played a book and I sang. But only with my voice. Then there was also an unexpected incident, a controversy in "La Nazione": the day before, at the press conference – which was held in an institutional setting like Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence, with a councillor from both the City Council and the Province, who introduced the event encouraging it – someone from Forza Italy woke up and said: "But who is this guy?" and so right there I grabbed the newspaper, since I'd just played a book – though it was by Pablo Neruda and it was surely better than the controversy in "La Nazione" – and I said: "Let's see what the controversy sounds like" and I tore up the pages. Since that's where the books are, I bent the thing my own way, to fit that place.

Then we went to an art gallery, and there I played while Giovanni Antignane manipulated what I was playing in real time, giving life to what would become all the artwork for the records, both this one and "Il posto delle fragole", for the next single and the next album; so a kind of acoustic veejaying in this gallery, where artworks were also on display and where we performed three more songs.

Grand finale in a shop window. It was a window full of mannequins, where, at first, there was a preamble in which a video for "Colpo di specchio", a song from the album, was projected. Then the sheet was pulled down, the crowd moved further forward, and a view opened up onto this fantastic shop, where we were immersed among these mannequins. I was in the third room, which had a beautiful view stretching all the way to the Arno, and we played the last three songs.

It was exhausting, but I think almost Guinness-worthy, because I don't think anyone else has ever come up with a tour crammed into a single day. Everything was rigorously filmed by a director and a sound engineer, and now we'll see: hopefully we'll make a documentary, a DVD.

How did people react?

There were already people there right from the start because the event had been well publicised, but the crowd kept building up as we went along: a passer-by who happened to arrive at the station would stop, ask questions, and then I'd find them again at the Feltrinelli. At the very last event, I think about fifty people saw what happened, because everyone else was out in the street and couldn't actually see what was going on.

And how did you prepare? Did you put in more hours at the gym, step up your meditation practice, or rely on guaraná?

No, I didn't take anything... What it took was a lot of concentration. I'll tell you, the moment it got underway, I felt relieved, partly because I'd delegated everything and everyone knew what they had to do: an incredible level of organisation. Luckily there wasn't a single hitch. From that point on I just enjoyed the day, which went well right to the end, and I was happy. I didn't go to the gym. I'm trying to do push-ups and sit-ups, but I don't think that's enough yet.

Oh Marco, you're such a cool guy!

Thank you.

A question I'm particularly keen to ask you. Preface: I believe that writing poetry isn't simply about starting a new line before reaching the end of the page, and that there are very precise rules to it, but I also realise that singer-songwriters are the closest thing we have today to the poets of centuries past. Some time ago you said that it doesn't make sense to "make poetry", but rather to "be poetry". Can you explain that point of view of yours a bit more?

In the statement I wrote for "Neve Ridens", in the poetic answer (the question was: "Why Neve Ridens?" and Parente gave two answers: one political and one poetic, ed.) I said that perhaps I recognise poetry as the only method of living. I don't want to get into the artistic or strictly literary merits of the matter, and in that sense, the great poets have already existed, and a singer-songwriter is not a poet: he's a singer-songwriter. It's not essential to elevate a singer-songwriter, that is, a songwriter, to some lofty status and compare him to a poet. We have music, and many singer-songwriters have neglected that aspect, which is why I don't consider myself a singer-songwriter; they've overlooked the fact that there's music as a vehicle, not a blank page and a pen. Many have used this idea as an excuse.

I'm not interested in Guccini: if you know how to write, write books: don't keep throwing the same old chord progression at me just because you've got things to say, because I won't accept that, because in doing so you're actually offending music, not poetry. In the end I realised that poetry could be a way of living that could give things meaning. For me, giving meaning to what you see and what you feel is poetry. So, the great poets, even when the poems they write are more or less beautiful, are poets, they don't just make poems. If they drink a coffee, they're poets. That's the sense of being rather than doing.

Well, now it's my turn: after "Libro Trasparente", now "Cuore Distillato". Tell me also whether it's easy to find "Cuore Distillato", because "Libro Trasparente" was really extremely hard to track down!

No, you won't find "Cuore Distillato" easily either, because in the end it was a production of our own: mine and Antonio Bertoli's, who's the Italian City Lights.

It was funny because it started off randomly, it was a kind of performance, a poetic act, and that poetic act was picked up, I don't know why, more abroad than here. We started in Brussels, then Paris, we did the whole of France, and so on. We'll go back in November to play some festivals, also because Antonio has some great connections, from Jodorowsky to Arrabal. Arrabal went wild. In Turin, at the Mostra del Libro, where we all were, he opened by saying: "In Paris I saw something: it was the big bang of poetry." In fact, he brought us back to this poetry festival in Nancy.

It's a parallel path. The series is called Bookleg and it refers exactly to the poetic act: the moment, the texts of that moment, in black and white. This is "Cuore Distillato".

I realize the voice is starting to tire. Heaven forbid, I'd rather end the interview here...

Ride the wave of great music

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