Singer-songwriters face to face

Rivalries and mutual suspicion have never been in short supply among the masters of Italian songwriting, and in some cases they've tipped over into open hostility. Roberto Vecchioni, however, has added a new chapter to the story - fuelled by an envy so uncontrollable it drove him to an extreme gesture.

"Many years ago," the Milanese singer-songwriter revealed, "I threw a Francesco De Gregori record out of the window. Out of envy." The unexpected confession came during an interview on "La versione di Andrea," the radio show hosted by Andrea Delogu.

During the conversation, the 82-year-old Milanese singer-songwriter and writer candidly looked back on his relationships with several key figures of Italian music. He spoke of his friendship with Francesco Guccini and Lucio Dalla, recalling with a smile one of the latter's recurring jibes: "Roberto, you're talented, you write beautiful things... it's just that nobody can understand a damn word of it!"

The anecdote about De Gregori, he admits, dates back to a turbulent period. "I don't remember if it was 'Rimmel' or even 'Bufalo Bill', but as soon as I heard it I grabbed the record and threw it out of the window. I was a bit out of my mind back then, and I sometimes drank too much. It happened a long time ago, and later I gave up that kind of madness. But yes, I admit it: I did it out of envy. It's a feeling that shouldn't exist, but when you're young it happens. Then, with time, it passes. At that moment I had realized that a singer-songwriter had managed to create a new language, to communicate something no one before him had been able to express. And I asked myself: 'Why didn't I get there first?' Today, I would never do such a thing. I love Francesco De Gregori: he's a landmark figure in Italian music, because he revolutionized its language."

Vecchioni has never hidden this admiration - so much so that he devoted an academic essay to the Roman songwriter: "Il linguaggio in canzone e la rivoluzione lessicale, formale e tematica di Francesco De Gregori," course material for "Forme della poesia per musica" at the University of Turin (Dams, academic year 2002-2003). There he describes De Gregori's writing as "cryptopopular": "an apparently learned, aesthetically refined, non-immediate language, yet sharing the same goal as 'popular' music: to capture, through symbols and abstractions, the sense of man, of life, of things." What matters, Vecchioni stresses, is not the supposed obscurity, but the effect on the listener. "Transmedial language," Vecchioni explains, "doesn't allow the listener to catch a fleeting, easily recognized sensation comparable to their own memory filter. No. It chains you to the immensity of your own sensations, forcing your soul, if it's paying attention, to move from one stimulus, one goad, to the next, and to recognize yourself in what you are and do: it rebuilds your person from nothing and places it before you. De Gregori doesn't take a direct photograph, in which you simply see, say, a beloved face and nothing more. That too is a fine thing, but a limited one. In his photograph the face is there and not there, it shifts or changes depending on how you fold or turn those photographs. [...] The word, the figure of thought, the communicating phrase is not single-meaning: it doesn't correspond to a single hurried reference tied to an equally hurried feeling: it ranges, it expands, it hands you a map, connects you to other maps near and far, it doesn't close the circuit, it opens it, for as long as you like. 'To evoke' is the exact verb for this way of communicating. [...] Those who aren't used (through culture, disengagement, laziness, boredom, ignorance) to evoking get left behind, blur into what's already been said, circle around themselves and chase their own tail. The mechanism of evocation offers an outrageous amount of freedom; you can even step outside the song and wander off on your own business (I'm thinking of Carroll's 'Alice'). To know how to evoke something in others requires a great natural gift and a natural inclination never to stop at the first meaning of things. To evoke something in others is magic, beneficial magic. Whoever among the listeners, the readers, is able to grasp, as if reading a code, a book of arcana (simple ones, in truth), the signs on which to let their imagination range, also knows what it means to be a man in the fullest sense."

Still according to Vecchioni, the Prince makes no concessions to a purely intellectualized lyricism detached from reality. He steeps his songs in their social and political substratum. He captures feelings and situations in which everyone can recognize themselves. He moves and excites. It's therefore secondary whether he does so through evocative, figurative images, or even through the "unsaid" rather than plain speech. If anything, the real difficulty lies in a "sonic" use of the verses that intimately intertwines word and musical expression. Vecchioni again: "His verbs, nouns, adjectives are entirely understandable, 'media-friendly' - there's no pursuit of the rare or the precious. If anything, it's the way he combines them that constitutes the great novelty, because it's unusual, unpredictable, even if, read carefully, it's still logical. De Gregori doesn't worry about using hiatuses, mismatches between notes and syllables, or repetitions, if they serve his purpose, and he sees with the eyes of a boy, of a young man, without metrical artifice. The melody, however sparse, occasionally nervy, is of primary importance; the lyric doesn't overpower it more than it should. Each of these lyrics, read without music, is orphaned - it isn't self-sufficient, as happens instead in poetry. Finally, De Gregori, in his own way, is clear, conversational, real; with the symbolic veil he uses here and there, he doesn't even dream of replicating the incomprehensibility of the world (Montale, Campana), but rather of softening the flatness, the rhetorical quality and the harshness of an entirely realistic language, for things that are, after all, so small." In short, it's not the language itself that turns out to be obscure, but often the meaning, tightly bound to the circumstance for which the lyric was written."

A relationship of elective affinities and mutual esteem, then, between two undisputed pillars of Italian song. An admiration that - on at least one occasion - even spilled over into an uncontainable envy.

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02/03/2026