Samuele Bersani - The Fisherman of Asterisks

Among the many Italian singer-songwriters born between the end of the Sixties and the start of the following decade, who broke through in the media spotlight amid the contradictions of the Nineties and then went on, with undeniable style and authority, right up to the threshold of the new millennium (and beyond), a place of absolute centrality undoubtedly belongs to Samuele Bersani. An author of the deepest melodic sensitivity and refined touch, Bersani managed to establish himself relatively quickly in an Italian singer-songwriter scene too often stifled and derivative, thanks to a highly personal, lively and thoroughly original language, able to depict with precision and hermetic flair a private microcosm (but not only that...) populated by oblique insights and ineffable daily epiphanies, blending with rare mastery ruthless emotional analysis and flashing poetic sharpness.

Born in 1970 into a family from Cattolica, Samuele Bersani showed an early interest in music, encouraged by the fertile humus of his home environment. After an initial apprenticeship made up of competitions and a scattered stint in various (post-)teenage bands, Bersani caught the eye of his future mentor Lucio Dalla (together they would craft the hit "Canzone"), who in 1991 had him open for his contemporary "Cambio tour" around Italy. It was in this context that the young songwriter from Rimini performed "Il Mostro", a brief tale steeped in tearful loneliness and dramatic incommunicability, a sort of dark hyphen between Riccardo Cocciante and "Elephant Man", centred on the story of a hairy six-legged monster, hunted down by scientists and morbid journalists and then brutally killed.

The song (commendable in its intentions, but still rather fragile and unripe, especially in the development of its theme, decidedly unoriginal though sincere) foreshadows the album C'Hanno Preso Tutto, released in 1992, propelled to success by a surefire hit like "Chicco e Spillo". Set against a fairly spare keyboard arrangement, the song sketches a concise vignette, made up of a few perfectly judged touches, admirably depicting a provincial, hyper-realistic Italy, across which the innocent figures of the two boys of the title spin like runaway tops along with their (failed) robbery scheme. But C'hanno Preso Tutto is, above all and in the final analysis, a deeply youthful record, poised between the diary-like note of a fleeting time of hopes, which lingers, at times entangled, in "Restiamo Ancora Qui", and the bitterness of too many illusions and blind utopias already frustrated in "Bottiglie Vuote".

In the grooves of his debut, Bersani channels (and exorcises) his love for Lucio Battisti, Lucio Dalla, Luca Carboni and Luigi Tenco, showing a keen eye for small yet telling social detail and a sharp knack for exploiting the imaginative resources the language offers him. There are, however, less striking tracks, where his flair stumbles into somewhat gratuitous or naive rhyming games, such as "Voglio Un Pianoforte", "Dalla Piccola Finestra" or "Domatore" (while "2 Settembre" fares decently), also weighed down by arrangement choices that inevitably sound rather dated today.

Major commercial success came, however, with his second effort, Freak, released in 1995, which sold over 130,000 copies and stayed on the charts for more than fifty weeks. Steeped in light, sun-drenched moods, Bersani's second album is decidedly sharper and more melodic than its predecessor, starting with the opening title track "Freak", a brazen, shameless lovelorn whine that doesn't hesitate to expose, with mischief and devilish intelligence, the clumsy mental conformism of a certain culturally evolved kind of respectability, set to irresistible little keyboards with a vaguely tropical flavour. And while the self-pitying drift of a shattered love in "Spaccacuore" or "Cosa Vuoi Da Me" (a cover of a Waterboys song) guarantees a triumphant landing at that summer's various festivalbar shows, it's above all in the more eccentric episodes that a poetic vein with a lopsided, unpredictable stride takes shape, as happens for instance in the curious "Piccolo Macellaio", a kind of off-kilter synth-jazz piece with Mediterranean aromas, built around the story of a shy butcher who leaps (in a dream?) onto a slice of ham to go light a cigarette butt on Etna, in the company of the mysterious female customer he's perhaps in love with.

Also worth noting is Bersani's willingness to tinker — with varying degrees of success — with different sound formats, mixing a hybrid hypothesis of robotic new wave with reckless 883-style refrains in the cannibalistic "Capo", or carving out a small pianobar piece with mocking dada-cabaret contours, almost reminiscent of Cochi e Renato or Celentano, in "La Fine Di Una Storia", propped up by Vecchia Romagna-style accordions. Equally interesting is the hypnotic psychedelic spiral of "Cado Giù", which sucks into its whirlpool Robert Wyatt, Paolo Conte, Fellini-esque nostalgia and a fervidly ungrammatical nonsense, somewhere between Jacovitti and Gianni Rodari. On the whole it sounds like a hedonistically tune-driven reworking of "I Vitelloni", or a vital exercise in Tondelli-esque libertinism in song form — were it not for the fact that, quite unexpectedly and right at the very end, the album delivers an epic and moving composition like "Barcarola Albanese", a small cinematic epic about the trials of a group of undocumented migrants (and that "monster" sung about at the start of his career finally takes on a clearer, more legible shape here), with Bersani, like a clever ventriloquist, letting the polyphonic tale of a world that speaks and lets itself be observed resound in all its raw harshness and its enchantment.

But in 1995 Bersani is still an artist at a crossroads: he could turn into a pleasant (if ultimately pointless) dispenser of well-mannered mawkishness, on a par with Massimo Di Cataldo or Gianluca Grignani, and win Sanremo, or he could embrace his "lateral" position with respect to the dictates of a certain Italian pop-music industry and keep playing his game as a free agent, perhaps picking up the legacy of a figure like Rino Gaetano.

Any lingering doubts are dispelled by an emphatic album like the self-titled Samuele Bersani from 1997, which forcefully catapults the songwriter from Romagna into the highest, most elite ranks of Italian singer-songwriter music, presenting listeners with an artist who has grown by leaps and bounds, rendered at times almost unrecognisable by an extraordinarily complex, layered style of poetic writing, full of images chasing one another through dizzying chains of free metaphorical association that are at times hard to keep up with. Take, for example, "Coccodrilli", which behind the guise of a sticky little seaside tune explodes into a lush, proliferating flow of writing full of seemingly disconnected, almost babbling digressions, which nonetheless manage to piece together the elegiac portrait of a contradictory, happily bickering love, trapped in a sickly-sweet pill of August dance-hall hully-gully.

With "Giudizi Universali", Bersani secures himself an unlimited pass into the collective memory of several generations, as well as a guaranteed place in the history of the best Italian love songs, but what really stands out here is the elegant slalom with which the unstoppable literary flair of his pen glides across the page of music, dodging every cliché and the clumsy phrasebook of a certain hardened songwriting junk made up of years and years of unhappy loves and broken hearts (and "Giudizi Universali" is also, and above all, an invective against the futile, deplorable uselessness of stock phrases), reviving the pulsing language of Italian song and restoring it to its full inventive potential. Equally beautiful are "Braccio Di Ferro" and "Lolita", small unfinished novels with a sumptuous, elegant style, flecked with jazz touches or uninhibited pop-soul openings, in which verbal inventions screw themselves into juxtapositions as abrupt as they are surreal and dazzling: words collide freely and fuse together, generating shards of highly mobile, pointed poetry, in an imaginative whirl of epigrams and striking aphorisms ("balance is a rose that blooms like an explosion", as Bersani himself sings).

And while in "Crazy Boy" (originally written for Fiorella Mannoia in 1994 and performed here again alongside the excellent Avion Travel) the author's gaze follows the flight of an Egyptian windscreen-washer who sneaks into an unguarded archaeological museum pretending to be a pharaoh, "Tonight" and "L'Istinto" take on a more introspective, autobiographical register — not always crystal clear, but still rich in evocative images and unpredictable communicative shortcuts from a sovereign mind, made weightless and gliding by a kind of perpetual imaginative hyperoxygenation.

Samuele Bersani thus lets resound the muffled rumble of a talented young author who has just discovered the explosive potential of his own free-wheeling wordplay genius, and who can boast an increasingly well-defined musical identity, wedged between the pyrotechnic inventions of early Dalla, the melodic grace of Fabio Concato, the refined, polished intellectualism of Ivano Fossati, and certain neo-hermetic delights of the controversial Battisti-Panella duo.

In 1998, the song "Siamo Gatti" served as the main theme for the soundtrack of the successful animated feature "Storia di una gabbianella e del gatto che le insegnò a volare" by Enzo D'Alò, based on a novel by Luis Sepúlveda. By 2000, however, the time had come for a perhaps inevitable showdown with the flabby, all-devouring elephant of the love-hate relationship that is Sanremo. Bersani plays along, but on his own terms, presenting a song as classic in tone as it is intimate and extraordinarily intense in style, caressed by his ever-oblique, elusive penmanship. "Replay", with its monologue about a love handed back to the mystery of an incurable solitude, earns a thoroughly respectable fifth place and the critics' prize, foreshadowing the release of L'Oroscopo Speciale. This is perhaps, to this day, Samuele Bersani's greatest work, in more than one respect his probable masterpiece, as well as one of the most significant documents of Italian singer-songwriter music of the last decade — an importance further confirmed by the Targa Tenco the album received that same year, 2000, as best album of the year.

A very compact, cohesive record, stylistically more uniform and focused than its three predecessors, L'Oroscopo Speciale showcases, as usual, an extremely rich exercise in lexical research, full of interlocking combinations and lively wordplay with a semi-serious, surreal tone, but this time projected against the backdrop of a tightly paced inner self-analysis, tangled up in a labyrinth of worn memories, strange symbolism and extremely daring autobiographical references. "Il Pescatore Di Asterischi" is built on one of Bersani's finest, most successful lyrics, but the sweet lightness of the arrangements, steeped in warm Mediterranean aromas and light, also shows considerable growth on the compositional level, well reflected in the melodic refinement of the stylistic solutions adopted with wit and elegance in splendid songs like "L'Oroscopo Speciale", "Non Portarmi Via Il Nome", "Lunedì" or "Senza Titoli", ever more firmly grafted onto the fertile tradition of Tenco, Paoli, Endrigo (but also Battisti, Concato, Fossati and De Gregori), here brought back to breathe vibrant new poetic life.

Bersani's restless, bloodshot gaze thus throws itself dead-weight into an indecipherable, fluctuating world, trying to reconstruct his own individual story, scattered haphazardly across time gone by, gluing together fragments of crumbled images and small shards of lived life, which get lost between fiction and senseless dream ("Il Fossile"). It is with this record (the most violently personal of his entire career) that Bersani crosses the small private hell of his own failed loves, joining the dots of a still-undecided existence with a twisted line of words that always seem to want to say, at the same time, more and less than what they actually say.

Also in 2000 came another important commission, the soundtrack for the film by Aldo, Giovanni e Giacomo, "Chiedimi Se Sono Felice", built around some of Bersani's own best-known songs; for the occasion, he also recorded the title track (later included in the 2001 second edition of L'Oroscopo Speciale). In 2002, as something of a halfway-point assessment, came the compilation Che Vita!, which, driven by the wonderfully apt title track about the contradictory delights of an increasingly dazed and disorienting postmodern world, sold over 150,000 copies, shooting to the top of the sales charts. The compilation is further enriched by a reinterpretation of "Le Mie Parole" by the talented singer-songwriter Pacifico, and the thoroughly enjoyable new track "Milingo", dedicated to the tragicomic goings-on of the well-known Zambian bishop, in a hilarious duet with Paola Cortellesi playing Maria Sung.

In 2003 came the long-awaited fifth album of new material by Samuele Bersani, Caramella Smog. The critical response was even more than positive (the album won two Targa Tenco awards, for best album and best song, with "Cattiva"), and from the outset the record stood out as Bersani's most complex and labour-intensive-sounding work yet, with the new songs focused on researching and exploring more elaborate, stylistically composite arrangements, ranging from more acoustic, intimate sounds to broader, more suspended soundscapes, capable of building around the words an aura of powerful solemnity and dramatic tension.

There are many notable collaborations: Sergio Cammariere, Rocco Tanica and Fabio Concato (on the enchanting "Binario Tre"), among others. Thematically, there is a fairly decisive shift towards more open, descriptive lyrics, very often tied to details of socio-media current affairs (take, for example, the opening pairing of "Socio Di Minoranza"/"Il Destino Di Un Vip") or even to news events, as happens above all in "Cattiva", whose implicit subtext is the notorious, highly controversial Cogne child-murder case and the accompanying morbid fascination of the public and the media that marked it.

If L'Oroscopo Speciale had been, in its own way, a hesitant and problematic self-portrait, Caramella Smog turns out in some respects to be a still life, built in several places from long, detailed lists of tiny, seemingly worthless objects, to which the battered imagination of an ever-lonelier soul nonetheless seems to cling as a last foothold against an oblivion that grows more uniformly white and looming with each passing day. A life, the one Bersani tells of in "Conforme alla Cee", "Caramella Smog" or "Meraviglia", with every corner of it colonised by an uncontrolled, impersonal proliferation of sinister gadgets and devices, seemingly turning existence itself into just another forgotten, indifferent thing among others, almost entirely inert and lifeless — if not for the occasional sporadic flicker of loving warmth that shakes it now and then out of its empty torpor, opening up a momentary escape route ("Pensandoti", brushed by a pleasantly bossa-tinged rhythm).

In 2006, preceded by the song "Lo Scrutatore Non Votante" (written and immediately released, to huge success, on iTunes), came Bersani's sixth album, L'aldiquà, which, from the title alone, hints at a thematic approach broadly consistent with the new phase inaugurated by the previous record. Bersani reaffirms his strong interest in a form of singer-songwriter music inspired, to some extent, by social and civic concerns, hurled into the disorienting complexity of an increasingly schizophrenic, tangled contemporary world. The author from Romagna, however, takes up and raises the stakes of this musical and literary project, inflecting it with a very personal, subtly off-centre cadence, against a backdrop of sound forms increasingly enriched with ever more refined solutions and expressive possibilities, balanced between sophisticated pop and an omnivorous soul-jazz steeped in visionary, meandering suggestions.

And while "Occhiali Rotti" (which won the Amnesty International award for best song on human rights in 2007) recalls, with touches as elliptical as they are moving, the human story of Enzo Baldoni, in "La Soggettiva Del Pollo Arrosto" or in "Lo Scrutatore Non Votante" itself (dedicated to that so typically Italian subcategory of cynical onlookers who talk tough, dishing out criticism and moral lectures, only to vanish the moment it's time to actually roll up their sleeves), or again in the beautiful "Sicuro Precariato", there emerges a concise yet vivid, darting snapshot of a reality crushed under the inessential, invasive weight of the media, in which the line between truth and fiction grows faint and at times almost entirely indiscernible, swallowed up by an almost paranoid sense of loneliness. Yet a certain ironic flair and a natural lightness of tone never fade, and Bersani breathes them into the songs, rippling them into the gliding pop of "Maciste" (set to music by Pacifico) or "Il Maratoneta". Equally delightful are the acoustic vignettes of "Una Delirante Poesia" and, above all, the two-voice fantasy of "Come Due Somari", resting on a lyric of rare pictorial subtlety and enriched by the nervy inlays of guitarist Armando Corsi.

Three years after the successful L'Aldiquà, Samuele Bersani returns with his seventh album, Manifesto Abusivo. Now approaching the age of forty, with a sizeable and well-regarded body of work behind him and a distinctly recognisable expressive maturity built up over the years, Bersani doesn't really have much left to prove to audiences or critics. What's asked of him is, in the end, mainly a fresh collection of elegant songs able to capture the complex reality of an intricate, elusive world with playful intelligence and, above all, with that dazed, stylistically unpredictable subtle lyricism his name has by now become synonymous with.

Manifesto Abusivo thus comes across as a sort of retrospective synthesis of the various evolutionary stages Bersani's work has gone through over the years, bringing together a plurality of ideas ranging from the most personal, autobiographical details to his usual disorderly, ironic observations of an "outside world" captured in all its comic clumsiness and tragicomic short-circuits of (non-)sense and paradox. What stands out here is probably a greater fragility on the musical level, which translates into a sound that's somewhat flat and lacking any real edge, wrapped in the rather polished shell of acoustic pop-jazz with frequent orchestral backing that isn't always particularly inspired or melodically incisive, especially in how it interacts with lyrics that tend to blend in poorly, remaining somewhat isolated and not especially singable. While the single "Un periodo pieno di sorprese" retraces the reasons behind a love that has ended, the swinging cabaret of the hilarious "Ragno" and the biting wit of the fine "Robinson Cruose" are both highly enjoyable. "Ferragosto" (co-written with his old collaborator Sergio Cammarriere, on whose 2004 album "Sul Sentiero" it first appeared) stands out as one of Bersani's best lyrics, at times recalling the glories of L'Oroscopo Speciale, but other, hazier episodes such as the title track "Manifesto Abusivo", the "Proustian" "Lato Proibito", "Fuori Dal Tuo Riparo" or "Valzer nello spazio" struggle to make an impact. Still, the balance is restored somewhat by the passionate invective of "A Bologna" or the now-classic, inextricable blend of drama and biting irony of "Pesce d'Aprile".

Given a boost by his appearance at the Sanremo Festival with "Un pallone", the singer-songwriter from Romagna releases another anthology, ten years after the previous one: the double compilation Psyco – 20 anni di canzoni (2012).

In September 2013, Bersani returns to the scene with Nuvola numero nove, ten new songs that delve even further into the private sphere of the singer-songwriter from Romagna, who makes clear from the album's very title (a translation of the English "cloud nine", equivalent to the Italian expression for being in seventh heaven) his desire to put himself back on the line.

The album, launched by the single "En e Xanax", is a parade of situations touching on both the universal and the personal, from blossoming romances to ones that end badly ("Complimenti!", "Spia Polacca"), alongside unsparing reflections on contemporary Italy ("Chiamami Napoleone" and "D.A.M.S.").

The record also marks the opening of the singer-songwriter from Cattolica to collaborations with artists from the Italian independent scene: Gaetano Civello, Gregorio Salce, Matteo Fortuni and the band Egokid all contribute to the writing of songs such as "Spia Polacca", "Desirée" and "Il Re Muore".

After seven long years of waiting, it's time for Cinema Samuele, a journey charged with pathos, sharp and ironic, through ten feature films projected within the author's imagination and in turn collected on an old reel and presented in a fantastical multiplex cinema.

The track that preceded the album's release, "Harakiri", is a wonderful portrait blending pain and rebirth, with his usual descriptive skill, and it's no coincidence that the opening line refers directly to the cinematic theme (“Stava facendo harakiri/ chiuso in un cinema porno francese/ ma dopo i primi tentativi – Non è il momento – disse/ Poi si arrese agli sviluppi della trama, alla profondità dei dialoghi”). That line, in its hermetic concision, contains the whole of Samuele Bersani's art: direct, vivid, grounded and metrically flawless in its delivery.

In some respects what's new here is the meticulous care given to the arrangements, where a greater use of electronic textures (even hints of theremin) has helped shape most of the tracks into new and valuable sonic landscapes. A case in point is the familiar poetic skill on display in intense tracks like "Pixel" or "Il tiranno", which, with perfectly placed instrumental touches rather unconventional for Bersani's catalogue, considerably enrich the refined, theatrical pen of the singer-songwriter from Romagna.

There's naturally no shortage of more classic ballads built mainly around voice and piano. The splendid "Il tuo ricordo" is an unflinching examination of the painful difficulty of forgetting the past, with a present that tries to fend off its attempts to resurface ("Il tuo ricordo trova un buco nella rete/ s'infila dentro il mio cervello e fa il padrone"), while the fervent, contrasting monologue of "Con te" delivers all the enthusiasm that only emotional purity can convey ("Sei una poetessa in piena come un fiume/ superi l'argine e allaghi di rime").

Contributions by Fabio Guastalla ("Nuvola numero nove"), Cristiano Orlando ("Cinema Samuele")

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

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