Riccardo Sinigallia - Riflessi nel tempo

interview by Giuliano Delli Paoli

Riccardo Sinigallia is one of the most introspective and inspired Italian singer-songwriters of the last twenty years. A melancholic and courageous author, capable of delivering enchanting gems both as writer and producer and as a "simple" singer-songwriter. A reserved and sincere musician. One of the last great craftsmen of the good Italian song. We caught up with him to talk about his latest album, his early days and the many changes he's experienced over the years.

Much of your latest album deals with the passage of time and the changes tied to it, with extreme depth. In every track you can sense a slight disenchantment followed by an intense awakening to lean on in order to face the future with renewed awareness. In "Una rigenerazione", for instance, you talk about hearts still young, as if wanting to free yourself of the weight of years. Meanwhile in "Che non è più come prima" you say you've followed time perhaps too meticulously. What's your relationship with time, and how much do your personal experiences influence your songwriting?

Obviously my songwriting is influenced by every event that touches my perceptions. The first relationship that can leave you totally shaken is the one between space and time — maybe that's why I realized I talked about it so often on the album, and once I'd put it together it seemed like one of the recurring themes. The line about the "young heart", though, was written by Filippo Gatti; I think I can say it has to do with how we relate to the conventions of time regardless.

The nuances of your songs are often marked by a soft, enveloping use of synths. It's one of your most distinctive traits. What do we owe this wonderful, personal tendency to?

Thanks for calling it wonderful... It probably comes from the distracted yet deep listening of my childhood: I was about to become a teenager in the Eighties, and I was captivated by the "warm" synthetic and analog sounds you'd hear in TV news jingles or radio broadcasts of that era, as well as in the songs of Donna Summer produced by Moroder, or those of Kraftwerk, or to be even more explicit, the Rockets. Then, as electronic and digital music grew, my natural inclinations also became more present around me later on, no longer confined to research or experimentation — I've always loved mixing song form with electronics.

From 2003 (the year of your solo debut) to today, the way music is sold has changed relentlessly. In that sense, it almost feels pointless to point out the Internet's obvious influence. How did you experience this "changing of the guard"? What do you think of this huge shift?

It seems like a natural effect of how we live now. There are — as with everything — pros and cons. We all know the pros and we're all excited about them, and rightly so. What bothers me most as a negative effect, though, is the deterioration of critical thresholds, the rise of aggressive, weak language on one hand, and an almost embarrassing lack of courage and personal opinion among both audiences and industry people on the other. It genuinely upsets and saddens me. Most people wait, fearfully, to check with someone else before expressing their own opinion about a record or an artist; often they don't even realize they're in front of an immense work or artist, because no one's given them permission, authorization. If censorship was the problem in the past, self-censorship is the plague of these years. So much information and so little lived experience, and therefore a scarcity of genuine emotion — everyone smirking over the latest clever wordplay, lots of gimmicks, lots of posturing.

In the track "Per tutti" you talk about "defeats" and "absurd addictions". What are you referring to specifically?

Well... the defeats are the everyday ones, those frustrations each of us deals with in our own way when we try to seriously and passionately build our own path, and everything seems to insist it's impossible, that today's utopia is a harmonious existence free of deceit. Addictions are often the low-cost remedy for those frustrations — here too, each of us always has one too many.

You recently produced Silvano Albanese, aka Coez. What do you think of this new wave of rap?

I don't follow it closely, because I liked it more back in the Nineties, when it was a genuine discovery and lived off that kind of wonder — people approached rap with real respect. Now it bores me a bit, but I understand that kids find that way of carrying the conversation forward closer to them, and they trade it like collector's cards; the same thing happens with indie rock and with a lot of musical genres, where the approach resembles a kind of morbid collecting and doesn't have much to do with what I consider truly exciting about pop music — then trends do the rest. I liked Coez because right away he made it clear he wanted to break that mold, and that there was fun to be had. In any case, there are some good artists, even if the genre has worn a bit thin on me.

How did "Prima di andare via" come about?

It came from something Filippo wrote and sent me over Skype, telling me it was for me and that I should set it to music. I worked on it for about two and a half years, changing and re-changing the music and the words of the choruses. In the end, on a train, reading the Frecciarossa in-flight magazine, the bit about the smiles came to me, and that's how I closed it.

Over your long career, you've collaborated, among others, with the great Luca Carboni. Even though you grew up in two very different cities, Rome and Bologna, in my view you share the same artistic sensibility, the same incurable melancholy. What did you take away from that collaboration, and when did you decide to work with him?

I ran into him at a concert in Bologna after finding out he liked my first two albums - I was very flattered by his compliments, especially since he's perhaps the only Italian pop artist to break through in the '80s that I've always followed with real curiosity. When he called me to work on his "Musiche Ribelli", I couldn't have been happier.

You're the author of several hits for Niccolò Fabi and Max Gazzè, like "Rosso", "Vento d'estate", "Lasciarsi un giorno a Roma", "Cara Valentina". Does writing songs that later turn out to be perfect (also) for other musicians come naturally to you, or do you have some particular secret?

No, in those years, on those records, I always worked as if they were my own - that's perhaps the biggest positive contribution I made, but there was surely also something wrong in that approach.

In "Impressioni da un'ecografia", a track on the wonderful "Meeting halfway", you described the feelings of a man about to become a father - his unconditional love, his fears, his hopes. Whereas in "Che non è più come prima" you tackle the subject from a very different angle, highlighting the feelings toward one's father, and toward life in general, of a now-grown child who is well aware of his own disillusionments. Do young fathers today have more issues to face than young fathers in 1970, or has nothing really changed in that regard?

As I try to grasp in "Che non è più come prima", every time is different - the good and bad examples of the past can help us avoid taking fatal paths, but inevitably we have to deal with what happens here and now.

"I've Also Seen Happy Gypsies" by Claudio Lolli, recently performed at Sanremo too, is one of the songs you feel most attached to. Which Italian singer-songwriters do you feel closest to, in some way?

I love many of them. People often compare me to Battisti, and I'm flattered by that.

Your songs have always had a certain "twilight" charm to them. But really, are you born with that crepuscular quality, or do you become that way?

I think you're born with part of it, and then you can adjust course a little - so it's partly karmic and genetic, and partly a matter of experience, attitude and luck.

A lot of water has passed under the bridge since the days of 10 PM Band. What do you still hold on to from that particular period of your life, and what do you remember most fondly?

I could sense, with excitement, the possibility of living through music, but I also felt uneasy about the gap between my expectations and my abilities - later I discovered it was all even more complicated than I'd imagined.

The camera is one of your great passions. It's no coincidence that you've directed many of your own music videos (and not only those). Have you ever thought about something bigger?

Yes, many times - honestly, I don't know anything about lenses, cinematography or cameras, they don't fascinate me, but I love images as a viewer, and above all the dramaturgy, the writing, the stories and the suggestions that arise when you combine words, sound and image. I used to enjoy exploring and experimenting, but now I find there's overproduction in that field too, so I'm no longer that drawn to it... music videos or short films, say. I'm getting old...

Over the past ten years you've played the Concerto del Primo Maggio three times. In that same period, Italy has gone through some truly major changes - six different governments have come and gone. There's less trust in those who are supposed to safeguard employment, and the welfare state seems increasingly shaken by an unrelenting economic decline. The vast distance between politics and the reality of things seems more and more unbridgeable, while the news is full of statistics about collapses and stalled growth. What do you think about what's happening in our country?

That we should rethink the whole cultural framework, and therefore the collective spirit: TV, radio, newspapers and all the channels of mass communication – including us, whenever we publish a post – should have a greater sense of responsibility. Some of them should quit if they don't have the strength to put content before profit; they should shut down as a service to humanity. The culture of a place is essential to regenerating spirit and enthusiasm - there's no point endlessly crunching numbers, you can shuffle the figures forever, but if people don't believe they're part of something possible, we'll keep isolating ourselves, and we won't have much left to defend or care for, except for those addictions mentioned above, since they work better and faster.

What plans do you have for the future?

(smiles…)