Fabrizio De André - Stubbornly and defiantly heading the other way

Fabrizio De André is one of the undisputed masters of Italian songwriting. Deeply influenced by the American school of Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, but even more so by the French tradition of the "chansonniers" (Georges Brassens above all), he was among the first to break the dogmas of the traditional "canzonetta", with his dark ballads crowded with lost souls, outcasts and the destitute from every corner of the world. His universal songbook draws on the most disparate sources: from medieval ballads to the Provençal tradition, from the "Spoon River Anthology" to the songs of Sardinian shepherds, from Cecco Angiolieri to the apocryphal Gospels, from Baudelaire's "Flowers of Evil" to Fellini's "I Vitelloni". Themes that over the years went hand in hand with an intelligent musical evolution, never inclined to easy trends or compromise.

De André spoke the language of a non-aligned poet, wielding the debunking force of irony to shatter every convention. In his sights ended up the "right-thinking" bourgeoisie, the Pharisees, the executioners, the hanging judges, the rogue kings of every age. His, ultimately, is a desperate message of freedom and redemption against "the laws of the pack" and the arrogance of power. Of him, Mario Luzi, one of the greatest Italian poets of the twentieth century, said: "De André is truly the chansonnier par excellence, an artist who fulfills himself precisely in the interplay between literary text and musical text. He has a story, and he really bites".

The music of his early songs, rooted by Nicola Piovani in the Italian folk tradition, was over the years cross-pollinated by other cultures. His language gradually evolved towards syncretism. And it was precisely his championing of dialects that earned him the Premio Govi. "In a young nation like Italy, dialects are indispensable," he often repeated. "They represent a desire for identification with one's own roots, which grows stronger the more the idea of a European mega-state spreads. And besides, if Italian weren't nourished by idiomatic phrases, it would become a language fit only for selling potatoes or arguing in courtrooms".

Waltz for freedom

Fabrizio De André was born in Genoa on 18 February 1940, at Via De Nicolay 12, to Luisa Amerio and Professor Giuseppe De André. In the spring of 1941, Professor De André, an anti-fascist, moved the family to the Asti countryside as the war worsened, buying a farmhouse near Revignano d'Asti, the Cascina dell'Orto, where Fabrizio spent part of his childhood with his mother and older brother Mauro. Here the young "Bicio" - as he was nicknamed - learned about every aspect of country life, integrating with the local people. And it was precisely in that setting that he began to show his passion for music: one day his mother found him standing on a chair, with the radio on, conducting a symphonic piece as if he were an orchestra conductor. Legend has it that the piece was "Valzer campestre" by the famous composer Gino Marinuzzi, from which, more than 25 years later, Fabrizio would draw inspiration for his "Valzer per un amore".

In 1945 the De André family returned to Genoa, settling into the new apartment at Via Trieste 8. In October 1946 young Fabrizio was enrolled in elementary school at the Istituto delle suore Marcelline (which he renamed "porcelline"), where he began to show his rebellious, non-conformist temperament. He was then moved to a state school, the Armando Diaz. In 1948, his parents, lovers of classical music, decided to have him study violin, entrusting him to maestro Gatti, who immediately spotted all the talent in his young pupil.

Fabrizio continued his studies up to university (a law degree), stopping six exams short of graduating. In the meantime, his musical calling had taken off, through guitar lessons as well as violin, performances at jazz concerts, and eventually the composition of his own original songs. A calling which, thanks to the success of Mina's 1968 rendition of his "Canzone di Marinella", allowed him to keep working as a musician. The song, written by De André in 1962 and released as a single two years later alongside "Valzer per un amore", is a dreamy fable suspended in time, but actually inspired by the true story of a prostitute's death. "The story of a girl who at 16 had found herself working as a prostitute and was thrown into the Tanaro or the Bormida by a criminal," in the words of its author, although the most plausible event behind the song seems to have been a murder on 29 January 1953: the killing of a girl named Maria, whose body was then thrown into the Olona river. A story that moved the young Fabrizio so deeply that he was driven to reinvent a life for that girl and soften her death. He would call it "a Neapolitan song written by a Genoese", and it would be enriched by the orchestration of maestro Gian Piero Reverberi: a slow bolero rhythm for a spare yet solemn musical setting, with lyrics that, in an almost archaic language, paint a fable of great poetic intensity. It would not be the last time that a news story was transfigured by De André into music. Indeed, everyday reality fuels his early compositions, which betray his passion for French literature: Proust, Maupassant, Villon, Flaubert, Balzac above all. Also striking is De André's delivery, which - like maestro Cohen's - lingers on the lower registers, thanks to his deep, baritone voice, adding an extra touch of drama.

These were the years when the Genoa School was turning out singer-songwriter hits with Gino Paoli, Umberto Bindi, Bruno Lauzi and above all Luigi Tenco. De André's friendship with the latter began in a Genoa dance hall. Tenco approached him saying: "Are you the one going around saying you wrote 'Quando'?" "Yeah, I said that around to get laid," De André replied. Tenco burst out laughing.

From then on a friendship grew between the two, until that tragic night of 27 January 1967 when Luigi Tenco took his own life in Sanremo. And De André, on returning from the funeral, sat down in front of a blank sheet of paper and wrote, in one go, a song for his departed friend, "Preghiera in gennaio", which takes up the theme of "heroic suicide", already dear to Leonard Cohen's "Who By Fire", and one that would recur often in the Genoese artist's songbook. A splendid, moving ballad, also included on Volume 1, the first album of new songs released by De André in 1967 on Bluebell, with lyrics that are once again deeply touching and polemical against the common morality that condemns suicides without mercy: Respectable sirs, I hope you don't mind if in heaven, among the Saints, God, in his arms, will stifle the sob of those pale lips, which preferred death to hatred and ignorance. A text partly inspired by a poem by Francis Jammes, a French poet of the early twentieth century, "Prière pour aller au paradis avec les ânes".

The first 45 officially credited to Fabrizio De André actually dates back a few years earlier, to "Nuvole Barocche" (1958), a traditionally structured piece in the vein of Domenico Modugno's melodic singer-songwriter style. The love song holds a prominent place in the Ligurian songwriter's early work, reaching its peak in ballads of aching emotional intensity, such as the sorrowful "La canzone dell'amore perduto", a fatalistic reflection on the end of a relationship set to music by the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann (the theme from his Trumpet Concerto in D major), and the melancholy "Amore che vieni, amore che vai", which dwells mournfully on the transience and fickleness of love.

Other songs reveal De André's more caustic, nonconformist streak, tackling themes that were uncomfortable, disturbing and outright offensive to the moral standards of Italy at the time. One chapter is certainly occupied by his anti-militarist invectives, concealed behind dreamy sonorities and lofty verses in songs like "La ballata del Michè", "La ballata dell'eroe" and above all "La guerra di Piero", almost an Italian answer to the pacifist anthems of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, telling the story of an anti-heroic soldier who shows mercy toward an enemy combatant, a gesture that proves fatal: in return, the enemy fires the shot that kills him. The guiding spirit is once again Brassens, but the inspiration also came from the songwriter's uncle, Francesco, and the memory of his return from a concentration camp, along with his tragic accounts of the war. The lyrics also carry echoes of other poems, including Arthur Rimbaud's "Le dormeur du val" (The Sleeper in the Valley), while one quatrain unmistakably recalls the song "Dove vola l'avvoltoio", written in 1958 by Italo Calvino with music by Sergio Liberovici.

De André's chief target, above all, is the most backward and hypocritical side of Italian society. "La città vecchia" is a mazurka-paced summa of all the topoi of humanity's disreputable back alleys. "Delitto di paese" is a biting noir ballad in which poverty and bigoted morality are steeped in a Baudelairian atmosphere straight out of "Les Fleurs du mal", with Brassens' caustic spirit hovering over every line. The "Ballata dell'amore cieco", a cruel parable of feminine vanity, seems to have stepped straight out of one of the Nibelung legends.

Among the songs of this period there is also a flash of satirical genius: the medieval ballad "Carlo Martello ritorna dalla battaglia di Poitiers", written with his friend Paolo Villaggio, which reaches heights of hilarious comedy worthy of Dario Fo's most outrageous theatrical monologues. While De André paints a solemn musical backdrop, Villaggio writes lyrics in a sarcastically lofty style, drawing on the medieval tradition of battles, honour and "chivalry", recounting the story of Charles Martel, who, having just returned victorious from his glorious campaigns against the Moors, can think of nothing better to do than act the perfect boorish male toward a working-class girl of easy virtue he meets swimming in a stream, in order to satisfy his sexual appetites — which end up causing him more pain than the physical wounds suffered in battle (“Ma più che del corpo le ferite/ da Carlo son sentite/ le bramosie d’amor”) — and who flies into a rage, curses and flees when the girl presents him with the bill (“E’ mai possibile, porco d’un cane/ Che le avventure in codesto reame/ Debban risolversi tutte con grandi puttane/ Anche sul prezzo c’è poi da ridire/ Ben mi ricordo che pria di partire/ V’eran tariffe inferiori alle tremila lire”).

The theme of prostitution resurfaces in two more gems from this period: "Via del Campo" and "Bocca di rosa", enchanted nursery-rhyme-like songs in which the oldest profession in the world is once again "redeemed" in mythical terms, lashing out at bourgeois hypocrisy and the bigoted mindset of Italy at the time. "Via del Campo" was inspired by the eponymous street in Genoa's old alleyways, which Fabrizio knew well from his nocturnal wanderings in the 1960s and which was always the setting for mercenary love affairs and illicit trade: a ballad whose music was drawn from a song by Dario Fo and Enzo Jannacci, "La mia morosa la va a la fonte". It is once again Brassens, with his famous song "Brave Margot", who provided the inspiration for the brilliant "Bocca di Rosa", another fierce invective against "the gossips of a small town", here made to stand for the backward, envious, sanctimonious mindset of all of Italy.

With this impressive run of songs, De André demolished, one by one, all the clichés of the traditional Italian song, pulling off, in Italy, an operation comparable to the one Bob Dylan carried out in the United States. "If I had never known Fabrizio's songs, I would never have started writing my own", said, for instance, Francesco De Gregori. And Franco Battiato too has said he owes a debt to De André's ballads, to the point of recording two covers ("La canzone dell'amore perduto" and "Amore che vieni, amore che vai") from the Ligurian artist's early repertoire on his album "Fleurs".

De André's songs are dazzling social portraits, steeped in a caustic, irreverent irony, with characters who seem almost to leap off the page, charged with humanity, unease and despair. Italian song finally discovers social and political themes, tackled not through an ideological lens but a libertarian one, anarchic in the purest sense of the word. It was therefore inevitable that De André — much to his own dismay — would become one of the touchstones of youth protest, as well as the nightmare of television bureaucrats, who never knew quite how far censorship could go against stories so subtle and metaphorical, yet just as explicit in their social critique.

From the Circle of Hell to the Good News

The end of the 1960s marks one of the defining moments of the Ligurian artist's career. This is when Fabrizio De André – Volume I was released, gathering some of his most successful early singles, followed the next year by the sumptuous concept album Tutti morimmo a stento (1968), the work with which he finally proved he could compete with the best international songwriters of his era even in LP format. Released with the subtitle "Cantata in B minor for solo voice, choir and orchestra", it is a journey through a Dantean circle of human desolation, among drug addicts, death-row inmates, fallen girls, ogres and traumatized children. An obsessed and obsessive journey, set to the notes of a symphony orchestra conducted by Giampiero Reverberi. The chosen format, as De André himself explained, is the classic cantata, "in which all the pieces are linked by symphonic interludes and share, at the very least, the same key, and deal with the same subject". That subject being marginalization and "psychological, moral, mental" death.

The prevailing mood is therefore bleak and funereal. The songs follow one another without pause, punctuated by the "Intermezzi", building to a crescendo that culminates in the "Recitativo" and dissolves into the closing chorus. The overture is an immediate gut punch, with "Cantico Dei Drogati", whose very title — in jarring contrast to St. Francis's "Canticle of the Creatures" — seems intent on underscoring the degeneration of the human race. When the orchestra — the Philharmonia of Rome — then gives way to De André's baritone voice, the intent becomes immediately clear: "I fired God / threw away a love". And a knot of anguish already tightens around your throat. "How can I tell my mother I'm afraid?", moans the derelict at the height of despair. And ahead, by now, there is only the night, the abyss, the end of everything. But there is also a yearning for eternity in the addicts who, "playing ball with their own brains, try to throw it past the set boundary, to the edges of infinity". It's a wonderful text, written by De André together with the anarchist poet Riccardo Mannerini, who died by suicide in Genoa in 1980.

The tension is briefly broken by the "Primo Intermezzo", but then the enveloping embrace of the "Cantico" immediately restores a solemn atmosphere, which slowly dissolves into the noir fairy tale of "Leggenda Di Natale", inspired by "Le Père Noel Et La Petite Fille", a Georges Brassens song from 1958. The simplicity of the chord progressions and rhyming couplets helps create a magical, rarefied atmosphere, worthy of "Canzone di Marinella". But the theme is anything but reassuring: the protagonist is a young girl deceived by a Santa Claus who spoke of love but "whose eyes were cold and were not kind". And so "now that others call you a goddess/ the enchantment has vanished from your every thought/ but still to the moon you'd like to tell/ the story of a flower wilted at Christmas". A chilling premonition of paedophilia.

Through the "Secondo Intermezzo" we reach the ideal centrepiece of the album's architecture: "Ballata Degli Impiccati", inspired by François Villon's "Ballade des Pendus", the first "poète maudit". De André's verses — always spare, rough, sardonic — never give in to the rhetoric of sentimentality. Thus, even Villon's condemned men are transfigured into mythic creatures, driven by a desperate, boundless resentment: “Chi derise la nostra sconfitta/ e l’estrema vergogna ed il modo/ soffocato da identica stretta/ impari a conoscere il nodo. Chi la terra ci sparse sull’ossa/ e riprese tranquillo il cammino/ giunga anch’egli stravolto alla fossa/ con la nebbia del primo mattino/ La donna che celò in un sorriso/ il disagio di darci memoria/ ritrovi ogni notte sul viso/ un insulto del tempo e una scoria”.

Giving the album an almost scenic touch is the gentle "Inverno", which revives the tradition of "seasonal poems" fashionable in eighteenth-century England. Winter is the image of nature erasing itself in the white of snow and fog, and in the black of bare trees, marking the cyclical end of all things: “Ma tu che stai, perché rimani?/ Un altro inverno tornerà domani/ cadrà altra neve a consolare i campi/ cadrà altra neve sui camposanti”. One cannot help but see in these lines yet another De André-esque metaphor for the crisis of a couple: the alternation of loves happens inevitably, naturally, just like the changing of the seasons (a subject very dear to De André ever since "Amore che vieni, amore che vai" and "Canzone dell'amore perduto").

But if "Inverno" plunges the listener into aching melancholy, after the following "Girotondo" there will be room only for despair and horror. “La terra è tutta nostra…/ ne faremo una gran giostra/ giocheremo a farla nostra/ marcondiro’ndero marcondiro’ndà”: the chorus of children driven mad, drunk on war and death, is one of the most excessive and chilling devices in the history of Italian song. The "Terzo Intermezzo" flows into the harrowing final "Recitativo" (a condemnation of human selfishness, moralism and insensitivity), alternating with the "Corale" — with the Coro dei cantori delle basiliche romane of Pietro Carapellucci, conducted by Reverberi, providing counterpoint to the invective recited by De André — and with the "Leggenda Del Re Infelice".

Deliberately redundant and baroque, influenced by the first stirrings of Italian progressive rock, Tutti morimmo a stento stands as one of the clearest proofs of De André's talent, not only as a writer but also as a musician. And his primary instrument cannot but be, once again, his voice: a deep baritone that — following Leonard Cohen's example — indulges knowingly in its lowest registers, ever deepening the pathos and drama.

Right after the release of his first great LP-format masterpiece, the Genoese songwriter found himself at a crossroads and took his time, putting out an album called Volume 3, featuring various re-recordings of songs already released with Karim, interspersed with four previously unreleased tracks.

It was record producer Roberto Danè who gave him a hand on a new concept album, which took shape with La buona novella (1970), a work inspired by his reading of several apocryphal Gospels, in which the announcement of the Saviour turns into an act of secular faith. “I felt an urgent need to save Christianity from Catholicism,” De André would explain, “Jesus of Nazareth, to my mind, was and remains the greatest revolutionary of all time. And the apocryphal gospels are a wonderful read, with many points of contact with anarchist ideology.” Following the very nature of the Apocrypha, the narrative of La buona novella stresses the more human, less spiritual side of certain traditional biblical figures (Joseph, for instance), and pays greater attention to minor biblical figures who here become protagonists (such as Titus and Dumachus, the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus). All of this unfolds through images evoked by way of metaphor, metonymy and parable, blending perfectly with the stories being told.

The songs unfold one after another like panels, in a kind of medieval morality play, paced by delicate acoustic-guitar arpeggios or the chiming of keyboards, with the liturgical choir providing counterpoint alongside the strings: a formidable demonstration of this comes right at the opening of the splendid “L'infanzia di Maria”, with a central section in which it's the harpsichord that takes centre stage with an astonishing fugue.

Equally extraordinary is the work on the lyrics, chiselled with refined and touching lyricism, starting with the poignant “Ave Maria” dedicated to women (“femmine un giorno e poi madri per sempre”). Mary dominates the narrative, gradually shedding the sacred traits of her figure and becoming ever more real and human: from her birth to her childhood in the Great Temple, through her expulsion the moment she becomes a woman, to her forced marriage to an old carpenter who leaves her alone, still a teenager, for four years (the embrace between the two in the desert-folk of “Il ritorno di Giuseppe” is deeply moving), up to the appearance of the Angel in the dreamlike, fairy-tale setting of “Il sogno di Maria” (“Lo chiameranno figlio di Dio/ Parole confuse nella mia mente/ svanite in un sogno, ma impresse nel ventre”) and her growing awareness of the fate awaiting her son. Mary returns to centre stage alongside the builder of the crosses (“Maria nella bottega del falegname”, almost paced out by hammer blows and embellished with an emphatic, musical-like refrain) and alongside the mothers of the two thieves, in the harrowing lament of “Tre Madri” (“Tito non sei figlio di Dio, ma c'è chi muore nel dirti addio”), where grief mingles with human envy for the Madonna's condition, since she at least can find comfort in her son's resurrection (“con troppe lacrime piangi Maria, solo l'immagine di un'agonia… lascia noi piangere un po' più forte chi non risorgerà più dalla morte”), even though Mary herself, stripped of every divine aura, lets out her own desperate cry: “As in the womb and now on the cross, this voice of mine calls you love/ had you not been the son of God, I would still have you as my son.”

As mentioned, the two thieves take on a central role in this “apocryphal” narrative: to one of them, Titus, is entrusted the very monologue that serves as the summa of the whole work, and it would remain the Genoese singer-songwriter's own favourite song, alongside “Amico fragile”. In “Il testamento di Tito”, De André uses the figure of the good thief, crucified at Jesus's right hand, to deliver a spiritual testament that also amounts to a critical analysis of the commandments of the Christian religion. It reaches a clear conclusion, finding relief “nella pietà che non cede al rancore” [in compassion that does not give way to resentment], a kind of “eleventh commandment” that also echoes a passage in the New Testament: “Love one another” (John 13:34-35). “It's a song that gives an idea of how laws might change if they were written by those who hold no power, one of those pieces written straight from the heart, with no fear of sounding rhetorical,” De André himself would explain.

And while the people, the apostles and “power clothed in human likeness” take the spotlight amid the country languor of “Via della Croce”, the final, choral act of “Laudate Hominem”, closing the circle, picks back up the opening theme with the song's emblematic line (“Non voglio pensarti figlio di Dio ma figlio dell'uomo, fratello anche mio”).

Musically too, La buona novella marks a significant new achievement: compared to the lushness of its predecessor, Reverberi reins in the arrangements, working by subtraction while at the same time heightening their sense of the sacred, helped along by a solemn use of Gregorian chant, which at times seems to mimic the multitude of the crowd. Also crucial was the contribution of a notable crew of musicians: among them were I Quelli, the band that would give rise to PFM (with Franco Mussida on guitar, Franz Di Cioccio on drums, Giorgio Piazza on bass, Flavio Premoli on organ, Andrea Sacchi on guitar, Mauro Pagani on flute and piccolo), while session players on the recordings included Angelo Branduardi on violin and Maurizio Fabrizio on classical guitar, both unknowns at the time.

A complex, multi-layered work, yet in perfect balance between different languages and registers, La buona novella would long remain its author's favourite work, one to which he would assign a central role within his entire poetic output.

After these two thrilling concept albums came a particularly prolific period, during which De André would produce almost an album a year. In his songs from this era, there's a clear preference for muted, subdued, “minor-key” musical tones, accompanying verses that echo the tradition of the ballad, with its distant medieval roots.

Edgar Lee Masters's “Spoon River Anthology” provided the spark for Non al denaro, non all'amore né al cielo (1971), on which the Genoese singer-songwriter was assisted by lyricist Giuseppe Bentivoglio and composer Nicola Piovani. Another complex, subtle work, laden with symbolism, built around two main thematic cores: envy (“Un matto”, “Un giudice”, “Un blasfemo”, “Un malato di cuore”) and science (“Un medico”, “Un chimico”, “Un ottico”). Side A is devoted to the first theme, side B to the second: while envy leads to negative behaviour (as in the case of the judge) or to alienation, science drives ambition toward potentially dangerous outcomes, even when fuelled by good intentions (as in the case of the doctor). In both cases, however, a possible way beyond is also suggested, through the figures of the heart patient, who overcomes his envy of health through love, and of Jones the busker, who wards off the dangers of his own ambitions through music, playing out of passion rather than for a living.

Once again the musical composition is painstakingly crafted, between orchestral arrangements – with Piovani's contribution proving essential – layered parts arranged in suite form (emblematic in this respect is “Un ottico”) and the use of classical instruments such as harpsichords and violins. Here too, then, is a concept album built on constant cross-references and circular structures (for example, the ending of “Il suonatore Jones”, which picks back up the melody of “Un chimico”).

Acting as a prologue is “Dormono sulla collina”, a choral fresco of the poor souls resting on the hill of the Spoon River cemetery, sketched in a handful of lines and left to drift over the instrumental introduction, while toward the end the sweet notes of the flutes take over, along with the central figure of Jones the busker (who will also close the record). Touching is the portrait of “Un malato di cuore”, in which illness forces a boy to “spy on other children playing” and to “have life narrated to him through his eyes”, until he meets his death just as a kiss seems to bring him back to life (“ed il mio cuore le restò sulle labbra”). “Il matto” too (Frank Drummer, committed to an asylum in the book) is ultimately nothing more than a poet who never found the words to express himself, yet who possesses a sensitivity that “normal” people can never attain.

Progressive-rock DNA runs through the waltz of “Un ottico”, a fable about a “dealer in lenses” in which De André's voice seems almost to disintegrate, repeated and layered as if to disorient the listener (“Vedo che salgo a rubare il sole per non aver più notti/ Perché non cada in reti di tramonti l'ho chiuso nei miei occhi”). And while in “Un chimico” it is experimental daring that brings about the pharmacist's death (“Morto in un esperimento sbagliato/ proprio come gli idioti che muoion d'amore/ e qualcuno dirà che c'è un modo migliore”), the farewell of “Il suonatore Jones” – a symbol of uncontaminated purity – lets through at least a glimmer of hope, with the enchanted gusts of the flutes conversing with De André's deep voice (“In un vortice di polvere gli altri vedevan siccità/ A me ricordava la gonna di Jenny in un ballo di tanti anni fa”, “Libertà l'ho vista dormire nei campi coltivati/ A cielo e denaro, a cielo ed amore, protetta da un filo spinato”).

But shining above everything is that sarcastic metaphor for all human envy and baseness, “Un giudice”, a hilarious reworking of the story of Selah Lively, a character who in Masters's Spoon River Anthology is not actually a dwarf but stands 1.57 metres tall: the Genoese singer-songwriter employs hyperbole as a device suited to his composition, telling the parable of a dwarf who is the target of every kind of gossip (“È una carogna di sicuro/ Perché ha il cuore troppo/ Troppo vicino al buco del culo”), yet also courted by women on account of the belief that men like him are “the best endowed with the least visible virtue, the most indecent of all virtues” — and when he finally manages to become a judge, he at last takes his revenge, although the lyric closes with a reference to God, the only true judge.

Sandwiched between two landmark records like La buona novella and Storia di un impiegato, Non al denaro, non all'amore né al cielo doesn't rank at the very peak of De André's output, but proves a pleasant and intellectually stimulating work, one that encourages a rediscovery of a literary tradition to which Fernanda Pivano had also made a major contribution — the translator and writer who introduced American literature to Italy, and who translated the very Spoon River Anthology that inspired the album.

L'amico fragile

But politics also demands its share. In Italy, these are the fiery years of protest and social conflict. De André, who always described himself as an anarchist, grapples with the temptation of subversion in Storia di un impiegato (1973), one of his finest and most controversial albums. The record, written together with Bentivoglio, tells the story of a humble office clerk who, riding the wave of the French May uprisings, lets himself be infected by revolutionary fire. It's a dark prophecy about the degeneration of protest into terrorism, which would soon after infect Italian society. Never so raw and realistic, De André turns to a modern language that — as Roberto Danè writes in the introduction — "breaks away from narrative form to arrive at psychological imagery, right up to dreamlike figures in a Reichian mold".

It all begins with listening to a song from the French May and a line that is a call to moral rearmament (and not only that): "However much you believe yourselves absolved/ You're just as involved" ("Canzone del maggio"). The clerk thus thinks back to the "ingrates of French prosperity" who "sang the disorder of dreams", and feels himself set ablaze by the anxiety of an uprising that now seems unavoidable: this is "La bomba in testa", the album's splendid manifesto-song, dramatic and gripping with its palpable tension, built on abrupt shifts in rhythm and the relentless crescendo of thoughts in the protagonist's mind. Torn between the anxiety for change and the grim sirens of violence, the clerk who "counted the teeth on stamps" will find himself overwhelmed by subversive urges, to the point of abandoning his everyday fears and certainties ("Dicevo 'grazie a Dio', 'buon Natale', mi sentivo normale") to choose dynamite instead, as he will later sing in the explosive ode "Il bombarolo".

And since power has no face, it is precisely "Al ballo mascherato" that the dynamite must strike those masks of Western decline: "a Christ drugged by too many defeats", "a Mary ignored by an Oedipus now grown cunning", an envious Dante spying on the lovers Paolo and Francesca in bed. The bomb is impartial, because it makes no distinctions, sweeping away everything, including a father who "stumbles over his own authority" and a mother who "should accept the bomb with serenity" since "Martyrdom is her trade, her vanity".

But the clerk's dream goes on, revealing to him the consequences of his mad act: he will not only have to pay with prison, but also realize that he has been nothing more than a puppet, a cog in a system of power whose life has been controlled and manipulated from the very start (“Quando uccidevi, favorendo il potere/ I soci vitalizi del potere/ Ammucchiati in discesa, a difesa della loro celebrazione/ E se tu la credevi vendetta/ Il fosforo di guardia segnalava la tua urgenza di potere/ Mentre ti emozionavi nel ruolo più eccitante della legge/ Quello che non protegge/ La parte del boia”).

So in "La canzone del padre" the dream finally turns into a nightmare, over the shrill notes of the strings, the dark rumble of the bass and a limping piano, warning of the destruction of that mad and criminal utopia ("assoluzione e delitto, lo stesso movente"). All that remains for the clerk is to bitterly acknowledge his life falling apart ("Questi i sogni che non fanno svegliare"), not before addressing the judge with the promise of a dreadful revenge: a real bomb, no longer just a dream. But that plan too will fail miserably, and even the woman who loves him will end up distancing herself, in the pages of the newspapers: the heart-wrenching "Verranno a chiederti del nostro amore", punctuated by the piano's angry tolling, is nothing but a letter from prison, in which the protagonist offers his beloved a sorrowful confession about their inability to truly communicate ("Non sono riuscito a cambiarti/ Non mi hai cambiato, lo sai"), along with a series of recommendations for her future, wishing that she finally take charge of her own life ("Continuerai a farti scegliere/ O finalmente sceglierai?"), complete with the famous closing verse: “Andrai a vivere con Alice che si fa il whisky distillando fiori/ o con un Casanova che ti promette di presentarti ai genitori/ o resterai più semplicemente/ dove un attimo vale un altro/ senza chiederti come mai”. A song that De André actually dedicated to his first wife Puny, as later revealed by his son Cristiano.

The story ends in prison, and it is precisely behind bars that, paradoxically, the protagonist rediscovers the serenity and human solidarity among equals that he had always been searching for: “E adesso imparo un sacco di cose in mezzo agli altri vestiti uguali/ Tranne qual è il crimine giusto per non passare da criminali/ Ci hanno insegnato la meraviglia verso la gente che ruba il pane/ Ora sappiamo che è un delitto il non rubare quando si ha fame” ("Nella mia ora di libertà").

The whole album plays out through a sequence of songs with a syncopated, almost thrilling rhythm, with an obsessive bass and injections of electronics, accompanied by language dense with recurring, obsessive metaphors. A record, perhaps, too bold for its time: back then many failed to understand it, while today it is rightly regarded as a classic. With Storia di un impiegato, De André, perhaps unwittingly, steps into the political arena. The far left brands him as indifferent to politics; the right accuses him of subversive propaganda. But he keeps insisting: "My political identikit is that of a libertarian, a tolerant one. If 'anarchist' has become such a dreadful word... In reality it only means that one believes oneself civilized enough to govern oneself, while trustingly attributing the same capacity to others".

A year later, Songs (1974) marks a return to a calmer style and a more literary idiom, thanks to a handful of covers of Dylan (“Desolation Row”), Cohen (“Suzanne” and “Giovanna d’Arco”), but above all Brassens, who takes the lion’s share with the spoken-word “Morire per delle idee” and the splendid ballad “Le Passanti”, itself drawn from a poem by Antoine Pol, a moved ode to the regret of missed chances, with that beautiful closing line: “In moments of solitude, when regret becomes a habit, a way of keeping oneself company, we mourn the absent lips of all the beautiful passersby we failed to hold on to.”

Overall, it's a summa of the Ligurian songwriter's artistic references, yet one that adds a distinctly personal touch to the interpretations, transfiguring them and making them his own in an original way.

The following Volume VIII (1975), born out of his meeting with Francesco De Gregori, marks another milestone in the evolution of 1970s Italian songwriting, under the banner of "sung poetry", enriched by an increasingly refined language. De Gregori brings his typical metropolitan-fairytale style, while De André pushes the use of figures of speech, flights of fancy and nonsense to the extreme. These are songs built almost entirely on the lyrics, where the music barely serves any purpose beyond suggesting the "tone" to follow.

A style that reaches its peak in the heart-wrenching "Amico fragile", a metaphor for those who resist in order to nurture their solitary dreams. Built on a bare, Cohen-like folk guitar, four looping chords and a chorus that strikes straight at the heart, it's the song De André always considered his truest self-portrait: "It's the most important one I've ever written, certainly the one closest to me," he explained. "It's a piece of my life: I told the story of an artist who knows he is useful to others, yet fails in his task when people no longer realize they need artists." In the lyrics, clouded by alcohol ("evaporato in una nuvola rossa") and shut inside a room ("in una delle molte feritoie della notte"), Fabrizio describes, with caustic style, a toxic bourgeois party he once attended, full of families abandoning their children to fate, lost in drugs ("Lo sa che io ho perduto due figli/ Signora lei è una donna piuttosto distratta") and arid, unfeeling characters in whose eyes an artist was nothing more than a jester ("È bello che dove finiscano le dita debba in qualche modo incominciare una chitarra"). A context from which he distances himself, reclaiming his longing for freedom (“E poi seduto in mezzo ai vostri arrivederci/ Mi sentivo meno stanco di voi… Potevo chiedervi come si chiama il vostro cane/ Il mio è un po’ di tempo che si chiama Libero… Potevo attraversare litri e litri di corallo/ Per raggiungere un posto che si chiamasse arrivederci”). Another triumph on the record is the equally vivid "Giugno '73", an epitaph for bourgeois marriage and its conventions, though it actually conceals an autobiographical episode: it is in fact addressed to a real person, a certain Roberta, with whom Fabrizio had an intense and important relationship between his first and second marriage, with that famously touching closing line: "I tell myself it was better that we parted/ Than never to have met at all".

From Rimini to Hotel Supramonte

De André's music grows richer and more assured with the arrival of the Fellini-esque Rimini (1978) of "I Vitelloni". The album, composed together with Massimo Bubola, paints a melancholy fresco of the Romagna coast, steeped in sea salt and nostalgia. Its manifesto is the title track itself, which opens the curtain on a gallery of disillusioned characters betrayed by life, like Teresa, who "has dry eyes" and "looks toward the sea, for her, a pirate's daughter, I suppose that's normal", though her gaze, beyond the beach umbrellas, ends up uncovering all the wounds of a burned-out existence (“E un errore ho commesso – dice – Un errore di saggezza/ Abortire il figlio del bagnino/ E poi guardarlo con dolcezza”).

Despite its driving pace, even more tragic is the nursery-rhyme-like "Andrea" (one of Bubola's absolute masterpieces), the bitter parable of a homosexual love "killed on the mountains of Trento by machine-gun fire", which drives the protagonist to take his own life by throwing himself into a well after learning of the death of his beloved "black curls" ("signore il pozzo è profondo/ più fondo del fondo degli occhi della notte del pianto… mi basta che sia più profondo di me"). Equally sorrowful and magical is "Sally", which tells of the end of childhood and innocence, moving from fairy-tale landscapes with tambourines and little goldfish to the reality of heroin and knives between the breasts, until her hopes run out in the slums, at the mercy of the king of rats.

Lifting the mood is the lively "Volta la carta", a kind of Celtic-flavored folk fable built on a burst of images revolving around its protagonist Angiolina, who “alle sei di mattina s’intreccia i capelli con foglie d’ortica/ ha una collana di ossi di pesca/ la gira tre volte intorno alle dita”, while "Coda di lupo" returns to cast a dark gaze on the current events of the Years of Lead, amid protest and urban Native American imagery.

There's also room for a reworking of the Dylanesque "Romance in Durango" ("Avventura a Durango", for which the American songwriter personally complimented De André), a fun tongue-twister in Sardinian ("Zirichiltaggia"), and the dreamlike "Parlando del naufragio della London Valour", in which characters and reflections chase one another, underpinned by an electric guitar. Closing the album, again under the sign of melancholy, comes "Folaghe", which will remain the only instrumental piece in De André's entire career.

Sealing the release of the album is a memorable tour with PFM, documented on two albums, Fabrizio De André in concert – Arrangiamenti PFM (1979) and Fabrizio De André in concert – Arrangiamenti PFM Vol. 2° (1980), in which the Genoese songwriter's classics, masterfully rearranged in a rock vein, find new life. "The idea of a tour with a rock band scared me at first, but risk always has its own allure: maybe in a past life I was a pirate, and so part of me told me to accept it," the Ligurian songwriter explained. "On top of that, I was tormented by questions about my role, my work, the lack of fresh motivation. And PFM solved the problem for me, giving me a tremendous push toward the future. Touring with them was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, because it was a tightly-knit group with a major history behind it, one that had changed the course of Italian music. And one day they took all of that and put it at my service."

The project of rearranging De André's bare-bones songs in a rock vein strikes a real chord with both critics and audiences: there will inevitably be those who turn up their noses, accusing him of having sold out to commercial compromise by playing with a rock band, in a surreal, wildly belated trial reminiscent of the one Dylan had to endure ten years earlier at the hands of the folk-purist tribunal, when he first started using electric instruments.

In truth, the partnership between De André and the band already dated back to the Sixties, when Mussida, Di Cioccio and the others, still going by the name Quelli at the time, had played on the album La buona novella. And the relationship certainly wouldn't end there, since violinist and multi-instrumentalist Mauro Pagani, one of PFM's original members, would years later become one of De André's closest collaborators (starting with the making of Crêuza de mä, 1984), while Mussida and Premoli themselves would take part, on various occasions, in the songwriter's subsequent studio works.

Two women, in particular, left their mark on Fabrizio De André's life: Enrica Rignon, known as "Puny", his first wife, whom he married in 1962, and singer Dori Ghezzi, who became his partner from 1975 onward. It's with her that he decides to retreat to that farmhouse in Agnata, in Gallura (Sardinia), which reminds him of "the Liguria of the Forties, where there were more trees than houses, more animals than people". And it's with Dori Ghezzi, too, that he lives through the harrowing experience of being kidnapped.

On the evening of August 27, 1979, the couple is abducted by the Sardinian anonima sequestri and held captive at the foot of Monte Lerno, near Pattada, before being released four months later (Dori was freed on December 21 at 11pm, Fabrizio on the 22nd at 2am, three hours after her), in exchange for a ransom of around 550 million lire, largely paid by his father Giuseppe. Before, during and after the kidnapping, several newspapers put out insinuations and falsehoods, some even linking the abduction to the Red Brigades, and it's in the very year of the kidnapping that the secret services end their surveillance of De André, whom they regarded as a "subversive".

In the days following his release, De André gave a calm account of the experience, using words of compassion for his captors: "They sometimes allowed us to stay untied and without blindfolds for long stretches... We managed to come out of it, while they never will."

A harrowing experience that leaves its mark on part of the untitled album later renamed L'Indiano (1981), again written together with Bubola and bearing on its cover the portrait of a Native American on horseback (an 1909 oil-on-canvas work by American artist Remington). Not even in the face of his kidnappers does De André lose his "habit" of turning conventional morality on its head when it comes to the guilty and their judges. The Sardinian criminals thus become "forest sailors" or Sioux Indians, criminals and oppressed at once. "I was kidnapped by a band of Cherokees," he recounted, "who, even before wanting money, wanted to prove they had the courage to kidnap someone". And the site of the kidnapping becomes the surreal "Hotel Supramonte", the code name used by the kidnappers (even though they weren't actually on the Supramonte), later described in almost romantic terms in the irresistible nursery-rhyme cadence of "Franziska".

The blues-rock opening of "Quello che non ho", driven by the shuffle of an electric guitar and accompanied by harmonica, highlights the differences between native peoples and those who represent the "oppressors", conveyed through the things that the oppressed, unlike the oppressors, do not possess. A powerful, driving track, bordering almost on hard rock, with an enveloping coda in which Mark Harris's keyboards also burst in.

The album's masterpiece – and the seal on this ideal union between outlaws and Native Americans – is the poignant "Fiume Sand Creek", which evokes the 1864 Sand Creek massacre that claimed the lives of more than 150 people from the Cheyenne tribes, whose encampment was attacked by the soldiers of Colonel John Chivington ("a twenty-year-old general, blue eyes and matching jacket, a twenty-year-old general, son of a storm"). A massacre for which, 136 years later, in 2000, the US Congress would apologize, having a plaque placed at the site of the slaughter to commemorate the victims. A moving depiction of an atrocious, senseless massacre (“Si son presi il nostro cuore sotto una coperta scura/ Sotto una luna morta piccola dormivamo senza paura… Quando l’albero della neve fiorì di stelle rosse/ Ora i bambini dormono nel letto del Sand Creek”).

Genova per noi

De André's inexhaustible creative streak is enriched three years later by a project as ambitious as it is original: Creuza De Mä (1984), born from his collaboration with Mauro Pagani and written entirely in Genoese dialect, "the Neo-Latin language richest in Arabic phonemes". It's a hymn to that Genoa which, for De André, represented a small continent unto itself, with "its scent of the sea, the aroma of its cooking, but also the stink of the harbor and rotting fish", that Genoa which had "the face of all the outcasts he had known in the old town, the pretty girls of Via del Campo, the flowers blooming out of dung". De André, in fact, despite being born into a bourgeois family, always had a soft spot for “i quartieri dove il sole del buon Dio/ non dà i suoi raggi/ le calate dei vecchi moli/ l’aria spessa carica di sale/ gonfia di odori”, as described in "Città vecchia".

Creuza De Mä is a passionate journey through Mediterranean music, where instruments from North African, Greek and Occitan tradition (from the Macedonian gaida to the Andalusian guitar, from the Turkish zurna to the Arab oud) coexist with electric instruments in a poetic universe of rare intensity. Genoa takes on multiple symbolic meanings, becoming every place, every home and every destination: a true "navel of the world". The particular stories unfolding within it take on universal value: the prostitutes of "A Dumenega" walk the streets of every city, and behind every corner of every town there's a "pittima".

The title track opens on the sounds of Genoa's chaotic market, soon joined by a gaida solo, a kind of bagpipe used by the shepherds of Thrace. As soon as the vocal line unfolds over the simple melody, any lingering doubt the listener might have about De André's linguistic choices is swept away. In "his" Genoese, De André's voice becomes even richer, more expressive than it had ever been, and the obstacles the dialect poses to immediate understanding are, in fact, a source of endless sonic suggestion. "Creuza De Mä" is about sailors returning home after fishing, and it's steeped in the resignation of someone forced – like sailors, like Ulysses – into an endless journey, a journey-as-sentence in which the stops along the way are a source of frustration and occasions for getting drunk (“E nella barca del vino ci navigheremo sugli scogli/ emigranti della risata con i chiodi negli occhi/ finché il mattino crescerà da poterlo raccogliere/ fratello dei garofani e delle ragazze/ padrone della corda marcia d’acqua e di sale che ci lega e ci porta in una mulattiera di mare”).

"Jamin-a" is perhaps the most beautiful ode to a prostitute ever written: an ideal continuation of the stories told in "Via del Campo" and "Bocca di rosa", but here the narrative loses all polemical or iconic intent. Thanks to his use of Genoese, De André fears no censorship, and approaches the song with an explicit, raw, irreverent, irresistible sensuality: Jamin-a's body takes center stage, with her "lengua nfeugà" – fiery tongue – and the "knot of her legs", ensnaring the listener in a whirl of erotic and sonic suggestion. The song's harmonic structure rests on the oud and the bouzouki, stringed instruments from Arab and Greek tradition.

On "Sidun", the funeral lament of the Palestinian mother stands as both one of the peaks of De André's poetic expression and one of the greatest musical achievements of the Genoese singer-songwriter's career. "Sinan Capudan Pascià" is the (true) story of a Genoese sailor who was captured by the Turks and became a pasha after saving the sultan's ship from sinking. The chorus, an adaptation of a sailors' song widespread in the Tyrrhenian area, is a little nonsense verse with metaphysical, symbolist ambitions.

The next two tracks bring the narrative and atmosphere back to ancient Genoa, giving full voice to marginalized figures. The "pittima," the debt collector hired to chase private debts on behalf of others, laments his precarious and dangerous condition, proudly claiming the "respectability" of his wretched trade. In "A Dumenega," Genoese prostitutes, confined to the ghetto all week, out on Sunday leave, stroll through the city like grand ladies, mocked by the hypocritical crowd of regular patrons of the city's brothels. It's also worth remembering that in the old days the proceeds from the brothels were collected by the city of Genoa, which used them to cover almost entirely the costs of maintaining the port.

The final track, "Da me riva," is an "ode to parting," the melancholy thoughts of the sailor setting off once again, bidding farewell to his companion, left behind on the shore, now just a distant silhouette, backlit.

Creuza De Mä is a work of staggering sonic and dialectal richness, effectively a cornerstone of the then-emerging world music genre, arriving four years ahead of Peter Gabriel's "Passion" and two years ahead of Paul Simon's "Graceland".

Meanwhile, De André collaborates with the other "guru" of the Genoese scene, Ivano Fossati, on several songs (including "Questi posti davanti al mare") and marries Dori Ghezzi in 1989. A year later comes Le nuvole (1990), which consolidates his partnership with Mauro Pagani, co-producer of the entire record and author of its music, while Fossati co-writes with De André the two songs in Genoese dialect, "Mégu megún" and "Â çímma".

Among the most striking tracks is "La domenica delle salme", which would go on to win the Targa Tenco for song of the year: a long, scathing piece of social criticism about the loss of ideals, born out of the disillusionment following the collapse of communism and the spread of hollow hedonism ("the bottle of orzata in which Milan floats" overturns the phrase "Milano da bere").

But what really drives the album is above all the mocking satire, sung in Neapolitan dialect, of "Don Raffae'", in which the protagonist, a boss held in the regal cell of Poggioreale prison, is attended by a prison guard-turned-butler who serves the mob not out of dishonesty, but because of the state's own absenteeism, which has swallowed up his "forty exams, six hundred applications and ninety appeals". The allusion is to Raffaele Cutolo, who, surprisingly, sent heartfelt compliments from prison, stating: "I don't understand how he managed to capture my personality and my situation in prison without ever having met me". Although naturally De André and Pagani's intent was quite different: to expose the collusion within prisons and the submission to organized crime of even state institutions. A sick relationship that leads Don Raffaè to exploit Brigadier Pasquale Cafiero in order to manipulate him.

Poised between poetry and folk song, the opening title track, a monologue recited by Lalla Pisano and Maria Mereu, and the eighteenth-century-styled "Ottocento", a kind of "opera buffa" in which, behind the mock-learned singing that apes opera and glittering Rococo flourishes, lies an invective against the prevailing frivolity and selfishness.

The overall meaning of the work was revealed by De André himself in an interview: "For the aristocratic Aristophanes, the Clouds were those bad advisors who, in his view, taught the young to rebel. My Clouds, on the other hand, should be understood as those cumbersome, looming figures in our social, political and economic life; they are all those who are terrified of the new, because the new might overturn their positions of power. In the second part of the album, the people move, enduring those Clouds without giving any obvious sign of protest."

Le nuvole is ultimately a transitional album, just as its title suggests, but it lays the groundwork for the next masterpiece born of the De André-Fossati partnership.

The Last Journey

A four-year silence follows, until in 1996 Fabrizio De André returns with Anime salve (1996). Destined to stand as his musical testament, it is also a splendid record, a journey full of suggestions, flavours, encounters. From Bahia to Genoa, passing through Sardinia.

Anime salve is not only his most genuinely multi-ethnic record, but also his most choral. This holds true in the relationship between the lyrics — with which the music lives in wonderful, complementary harmony — and the style and at times saturated arrangements, and again (and above all) in its guest appearances and collaborations. De André's guitar is surrounded by a sea of instruments, old and new, from the most disparate geographical origins, in a cultural syncretism that is also reflected in the choice of languages, with songs sung in Italian, Romani, Brazilian Portuguese, and Genoese dialect. And his deep voice, though clouded by smoke and the years, still never fails to enchant.

So many accompany him on this journey: Piero Milesi in the producer's chair, his son Cristiano, who becomes his true right-hand man, Ellade Bandini on drums, the orchestra "Il Quartettone", his wife Dori Ghezzi and daughter Luvi on vocals, and above all his fellow Genoese Ivano Fossati, co-writer of the songs. And then the great Brazilian percussionist Naco, the legendary cymbalom player Sándor Kuti, Russian accordionist Vladimir Denissénkov, the unmistakable harp of Cecilia Chailly, the equally faithful Mario Arcari, and a long list of top-level musicians.

It is a journey crowded with solitary spirits, who inhabit secluded corners of the Earth. "Isolation," De André said, "allows you not to be part of the crowd. It is the only condition suited to avoiding contamination by partisan passions, a state of inner calm that allows one to surrender to the absolute." A goal announced right from the album's title, which preserves the roots of both "anima" (soul) and "salvo" (safe/saved), meaning "solitary spirit".

Entirely acoustic, the album blends ethnic, jazz and folk flavours. The universal psalm for two voices of the title track is the paradigm of the collaboration with Fossati, of the chemistry the two pursued and found only with effort, of the vocal and stylistic differences that here enrich the duet with new elements rather than undermining its unity. A diversity that reappears in the vocal contrast as much as in the "solitary spirits" of the lyrics, free by choice from the conventions that make men uniform, forcing them to keep their personality — and consequently their best selves — hidden. A process wholly absent from the spontaneity of the animal world, honoured in the absorbed, half-sung dance of "Le acciughe fanno il pallone", whose dynamic framework conceals an instrumental drive that bursts out in the finale, while the fisherman chases the impossible "dream" of "catching the golden fish".

"I saw myself from behind, leaving", runs a line from "Anime salve": it is a rejection of fixed identity, of the man shaped by the "law of the pack", which dictates to each person where and how to be in the world. A rejection similar to that of "Princesa" (drawn from the interview-narrative of the same name by Maurizio Iannelli), who tries to "correct fortune" only to end up "among gridlocks of male desires". An extraordinary literary and musical invention built on Bahian rhythms (a fusion of jazz, pop and bossa nova) and tropical colours, blending South American harmonics and overtones with a jingling refrain in the style of "Creuza de mä", swinging interludes and folk dances. A whole that mirrors the theme of the journey and connects it to that of prostitution, so dear to De André, in what is the most emblematic example of how the songwriter's poetics evolved alongside his stylistic and cultural migration (from the prostitute to the transsexual). The protagonist is in fact Fernandinho, who becomes Fernanda, misunderstood within the context of a Brazilian farming family and forced to sell, in order to support herself, that longed-for female body. Once again an outsider, once again a marginalized figure forced to pay in order to gain freedom.

Another kind of free, self-chosen solitude is that of the Roma people, portrayed through the Serbian-Montenegrin tribe of the “Khorakhanè,” wandering the world “tra le fiamme dei fiori a ridere e a bere.” The whole piece opens with an electronic dawn over which an introductory recitative unfolds, and closes with an orchestral aria of Donizetti-like intensity sung in the Romani language. A passage that would reach its emotional peak live, carried by the crystalline voice of Luvi, ready to take the place of Dori Ghezzi's drier tone on the record. In between, De André sets down, with the utmost delicacy, towering lines such as “Saper leggere il libro del mondo/ con parole cangianti e nessuna scrittura” or “Questo filo di pane tra miseria e fortuna.”

Not even the tender “Dolcenera” escapes a fate of solitude: it pairs a Brazilian-style chant with one of Fabrizio's finest tarantas, setting the accordion's unfurling melody against one of his masterful narratives built on parallels, allusions and metaphors. Here love takes centre stage — the love of a man anxiously awaiting a woman, to the point of picturing her arrival even as she is actually caught up in Genoa's 1970 flood and the overflowing of the River Nera.

And when “la corsa del tempo spariglia destini e fortune,” envy and feuding are born in “Disamistade,” which shows no mercy to anyone, innocent or guilty alike: a sardonic ballad showcasing De André at his best as a rhymer, though it also draws strength from free verse that heightens its pain (“uno scoppio di sangue, un'assenza apparecchiata per cena”), alongside Milesi's liturgical electronic backing and the orchestra's sighing passages. It's both a fresh tribute to musical Sardinia and an indictment of the feuds typical of the island's culture a few decades back. It stands as one of the two great exceptions to the album's thematic consistency, alongside the Genoese-language duet “Â cumba,” set to a sparkling saltarello rhythm and buoyed by the female chorus — the only moment of positivity on an album of long, anguished songs.

The record closes with the solemn invocation of “Smisurata Preghiera” (inspired by Alvaro Mutis's “Gabbiere”), which is almost the spiritual testament of De André's entire body of work. It is the testimony of a man who always lived in splendid isolation, a necessary condition for “consegnare alla morte una goccia di splendore, di umanità.” Three minutes of invective and spiritual indignation, underscored by the keyboards' moved jazz chords and the drums' solemn, ceremonial syncopations, followed by four minutes of instrumental transfiguration: first a swelling invocation of Mediterranean horns, then a symphonic digression from which the album's moral emerges — all the boundless sorrow of the “souls” in the title. It is the furious demand for redemption voiced by the characters portrayed throughout the record, those who chose to pay for their freedom with solitude and marginalization. It is the journey's conclusion, its outlet, the synthesis of the idea of freedom, born of the long clash between the starting thesis (the yearning for freedom, for tearing down borders and engaging with the world beyond oneself) and the many antitheses encountered along the way (the price to be paid for that very freedom).

In the collective imagination it is the epitaph within the epitaph, De André's pre-mortem testament, and for some even the summation of the artist's entire musical and lyrical output. A role that, broadening the scope, belongs to the whole of Anime salve itself — one of the absolute peaks of Italian music, for its stylistic variety and lyrical depth, and the final gift of one of its greatest figures.

De André, then, is the first migrant, ever ready to borrow musical and linguistic elements from the most disparate traditions, and behind him the protagonists of the stories told in these songs are migrants too. Stories of marginalization, of difference, of solitude and freedom — among the most uncomfortable and deeply felt of his career — rendered through lyrics never so direct, explicit, at times almost coarse. The focus on the “outsider,” the thoroughly Baudelairean tension between the horror of reality and the contradictory wonder of humanity, between a marked rejection of (supposed) conventional virtues and an almost obsessive justification of vices (specious as they may be), is perhaps the one true trait d'union, entirely lyrical in nature, between the early De André and the late one.

On the subsequent tour — later immortalized in the posthumous live album Fabrizio De André in concert (1999) — came the live seal on a record already hailed as an instant classic, along with the embrace of his children, Cristiano and Luvi: with the latter, the magical duet on “Geordie” would be revived on stage, the ancient British ballad dating back to around the 16th century, which Fabrizio had reworked in 1966, performing it as a duo with Maureen Rix, with Italian-language lyrics drawn from Claude François's 1965 version.

“I come from a bourgeois background and I've settled a bit too comfortably onto that feather mattress. I could have given much more had I been born in Foce, the son of a fishmonger,” De André would often joke, poking fun at his proverbial laziness. A laziness that drove record executives to despair: it was almost impossible to get an interview or a TV appearance out of him, and rare to see him on tour. Yet, by a strange twist of fate, his very last summer turned out to be his busiest ever. A string of concerts across Italy was meant to relaunch him, following the signing of the “anti-laziness contract,” as he had nicknamed his deal with Ricordi running through 2002. “Now,” he had announced, “I'll have to finally get around to making the covers album dedicated to Brazilian singer-songwriters that I've had in mind for a while. At my pace, I'd never manage to record an album entirely of my own songs.” But fate, unfortunately, had a grim ending in store.

Fabrizio De André died on 11 January 1999, at Milan's Istituto dei Tumori. He leaves Italian culture with words and sounds to be remembered forever, and the world of music criticism with countless imitators.

His nearly forty-year career was fittingly honoured by the triple box set Stubbornly and defiantly heading the other way (2005): fifty-four tracks, all “demastered” to recapture their original flavour, imperfections included. A moving journey through the words and sounds of the man who will probably go down as the greatest Italian singer-songwriter of all time.

His admirers will forever keep dedicating to him the lines Fabrizio wrote for his friend Luigi Tenco on the night he killed himself: “Ascolta la sua voce/ che ormai canta nel vento/ Dio di misericordia, vedrai, sarai contento”. It is the “Preghiera in gennaio” of everyone who ever loved him.

Contributions by Giovanni Agnes (“Creuza De Mä”), Matteo Meda and Michele Saran (“Anime salve”)

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