The self-portrait

In his body of work, Vasco Rossi often turns to imaginary characters to exorcise his obsessions and demons. One of these is the protagonist of a 1977 song included on his debut album "…Ma cosa vuoi che sia una canzone…", released a year later. It's one of the singer-songwriter from Zocca's earliest and most genuine confessions in song form, written during a period of deep emotional instability. At its center is a girl unable to voice her own distress, and therefore shut out by a society that measures worth by usefulness. “Jenny non vuol più parlare/ non vuol più giocare/ vorrebbe soltanto dormire/ Jenny non vuol più capire/ sbadiglia soltanto/ non vuol più nemmeno mangiare”, is the opening line that immediately plunges us into the unease of "Jenny è pazza".

But Jenny is really nothing more than Vasco Rossi himself, grappling with his famous "nineteenth nervous breakdown" — an alter ego through which the artist from Emilia explores the depths of human fragility and the feeling of marginalization, through a constant pull toward those "limits of the mind" that he says he needs to visit for the sake of his art, in a precarious balance between highs and lows, between isolation and a return to the surface.

Over time, that personal confession has taken on a broader meaning. The line "life is all a balancing act above madness", originally conceived as a private description, turned out to be something many could relate to — almost a generational formula. "Jenny è pazza" thus stops being merely the portrait of one person's inner turmoil and becomes a wider representation of the human condition, suspended between instability and the search for meaning.

Vasco Rossi himself, on the occasion of World Mental Health Day 2025, dedicated a long Instagram post to the story behind the song: "Jenny… a young woman who has problems and can't communicate them to the world, she feels excluded. She's of no use to society, and if you're not useful, they push you aside, they marginalize you… — Vasco writes — I wrote it when my adventure hadn't started yet. In truth, in the song I'm talking about myself… Jenny is me, in the grip of my 'nineteenth nervous breakdown', the one my aunt would have cured with a good beating. Back then it was called a breakdown, today they'd call it depression. I always got through it, and I still do, thanks to music, thanks to concerts — for me, that's the reason to exist and to keep going. I've always nurtured my own streak of dreamy madness.

For the love of art, I find myself visiting the 'limits of the mind', walking a tightrope that brings you close to that hell 'which truly exists'… Dizzying heights and deep valleys of loneliness that I visit and always come out of standing. When I wrote that life 'is all a balancing act above madness', I was talking about myself and thought it described only me… But then, seeing how everyone recognized themselves in it, I realized it was a universal song. Everyone lives on the tightrope, in a precarious balance above their own kind of madness".

A daily struggle, then, which Vasco ultimately exorcises through the song's closing line: "Jenny has paid for everyone, she's paid for us, who now just stand and watch her… Jenny is only a memory now, something bitter to swallow down". Jenny thus becomes the symbol of all those left behind, abandoned, because they're different, difficult, exhausting. A relentless snapshot of loneliness within suffering, of the prejudice and isolation faced by those who live outside convention. Through a lucid, unsparing self-portrait, Vasco Rossi delivered here his first j'accuse against a society that ghettoizes and excludes.

 

 

 

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A post shared by Vasco Rossi (@vascorossi)

One final curiosity: “Jenny/Silvia” was also Vasco Rossi's first single, released on 15 June 1977 and pressed in just 2,500 copies: these are two versions that differ instrumentally from those found on the album “…Ma cosa vuoi che sia una canzone…”. The label was Jeans, run by Paolo Borgatti, a publisher specialising in liscio music. The 7-inch was presented in the main hall of an institute in Modena and, despite the tiny initial pressing, it quickly found success, helped in no small part by heavy rotation on Punto Radio, the independent station founded in Zocca by Vasco Rossi himself together with his friend Marco Gherardi.

The success of “Jenny” prompted Borgatti to produce Vasco's debut album, with the help of musician Alan Taylor and Gaetano Curreri, leader of Stadio (at the time still Lucio Dalla's backing band), who arranged every track on “…Ma cosa vuoi che sia una canzone…”, including “Jenny”, which was expanded with an extra final verse, rearranged and retitled “Jenny è pazza”.

And 40 years on, the song has also been given a motion-graphic video, drawn on paper by Rosanna Mezzanotte and later digitised. It was directed by Arturo Bertusi, Vasco's art director, with production by Chiaroscuro Creative. It's a piece built on the interplay between images and writing, with the peculiarity that some pre-existing drawings ended up inspiring part of the story. “But all the other drawings, hundreds of them, were made on paper based on the script,” Bertusi explained, “and were then digitised for the animation and production.”

In the video, Jenny literally falls apart, her inner world crumbling along with the world around her. “And yet,” the director went on, “we always took care of her: we drew her, coloured her, sent her into fantastical worlds, made her fears visible — and therefore less frightening — right up to helping her, starting from those very fragments, put herself back together and rebuild her identity. This process, like a beneficial contagion, was a genuine emotional catharsis for the whole team, who worked on this project with an almost obsessive love and passion. Because we are all Jenny, or at least we all were, for a while.”

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16/04/2026