Vinicio Capossela - The omnivorous minstrel

Vinicio Capossela is an omnivorous gourmet of song. A restless dowser – by his own definition – he insatiably chases sounds, stories, cultures and characters from every era, always managing to devour their essence, their scent, their allure, through a sort of bizarre suspension of time and disbelief. Conte and Waits, Latin American languor and Balkan dust, polkas and rebetiko, Louis Prima and jazz, Weill and village festivals: everything coexists and is magically transfigured into an overflowing, universal songbook that nonetheless remains always unmistakable, thanks also to the literary quality of his brilliant lyrics, which has allowed him to launch a successful parallel career as a writer. A multiple award-winner (four Targhe Tenco) and now venerated almost unconditionally by critics, Capossela is the finest Italian singer-songwriter of his generation, but above all one of the few truly complete artists the national scene has produced in recent years.

In my last year of high school I discovered Tom Waits. I started listening to him in class, with my Walkman, and from that moment on my flirtation with the electric guitar and rock bands was over: my interest shifted to the upright bass, to the saxophone, but it wasn't easy to find people interested in going down that road, because everyone was into rock.

(Vinicio Capossela)

An Emigrant's Hard Knocks

Born in Germany (Hannover, December 14, 1965), with roots in Irpinia (his father, Vito, is from Calitri, his mother, Antonietta, from Andretta) and adopted by Emilia (between Reggio, Parma and Modena), Vinicio Capossela has known the hard knocks of the emigrant's life, turning rootlessness into a philosophy of life. Even though his roots are firmly planted in his father's homeland, Calitri, in the Ofanto valley, "Il paese dei Coppoloni", to which he would dedicate a book and an entire album (Canzoni della Cupa, 2016). "A place of Homeric epic that for him holds the same meaning as Macondo did for Gabriel Garcia Marquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude", as Massimo Padalino recalls ("Il ballo di San Vinicio").

In chilly Hannover, meanwhile, the Capossela family was one of the many katzelmacher households - makers of "cazze" (wooden kitchen tools), as the Germans disparagingly called the Pan-Germanic "Italian terroni" who had landed in Odin's land. His father Vito, however, was the holder of the family's theatrical streak: he named his son Vinicio in homage to the protagonist of the blockbuster "Quo vadis?" (Marco Vinicio) and to the famous accordionist of the same name, who recorded many albums for Durium in the Sixties. A stage name, really, far more than the one he was initially meant to be given: Vincenzo.

Little Capossela would live in Lower Saxony for just one year. Because his adopted homeland lay a few kilometres to the south, in Scandiano, a small town in the Reggio Emilia Apennines. A very rural, decidedly unparanoid corner of Emilia: it's here that the family moved in 1966.

A naturally gifted talent from a very young age (he was playing the organ at eleven), the young Capossela briefly attended the Conservatory, then made his surprising debut in a hard-rock band (Hurricane), before the revelation that would mark him for life. That of the messiah Tom Waits, who appeared to him in the grooves of "Foreign Affairs", especially in "Burma Shave", a fetish-song that would haunt him like a mantra. The ogre of Pomona showed him the way. And the fresh-faced Vinicio followed it with conviction. "I was in my last year of high school," he would recall, "I started listening to him in class, with my Walkman, and from that moment on my flirtation with the electric guitar and rock bands was over: my interest shifted to the upright bass, to the saxophone, but it wasn't easy to find people interested in going down that road, because all the young people were into rock."

Having finished high school with a diploma in chemical technology (a qualification that would mainly serve him for experimenting with his artistic alchemy), he enrolled at university and formed, with his then-partner, the duo Blue Valentine (him on piano, her on vocals), performing in clubs for two years (1986-'88) with a repertoire of international standards, from Tenco to Gershwin. He then went solo on the Romagna riviera and, for a while, in New York, where he moved to soak up the hundred musical voices of the Big Apple: jazz, first and foremost, and then the great singers. But more than the classic crooners like Frank Sinatra and Bing Crosby, he looked to the Italian-American States embodied by the earthy Louis Prima, to that unlikely slang, the offspring of coarse migrants who passed through Ellis Island and were only grudgingly absorbed by the New World. His future Vic Damone would be its natural reincarnation.

The most obvious models for his early songs are naturally the harsh, delirious blues of Waits, but also the smoky jazzy atmospheres of Paolo Conte and the mournful ballads of Luigi Tenco, an idol of his father's, alongside Adriano Celentano. An intriguing blend, one that didn't escape the attentive ears of Francesco Guccini, whom Vinicio ran into at the bar of the Teatro Ariston, on the occasion of a Premio Tenco. The Maestro invited him home, to Bologna, on via Paolo Fabbri 43. He listened to his tapes and sensed the talent hiding behind those crackly little cassettes. So he put Capossela in the hands of his friend Renzo Fantini, who would become his producer. He brought him to the Club Tenco and paved the way for the recording debut of that bizarre piano-playing minstrel.

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Signed by Cgd, Capossela released his first LP, All'una e trentacinque circa (1990), a title that says it all: it's the time he used to sing at the Pjazza (the historic club in Bellaria Igea Marina), while the waitresses tidied up the bar. A kind of earthy answer to 'Round Midnight.

The album immediately showcased the peculiarity of his style and earned him the Premio Tenco for best debut work. Credit also goes to the finely calibrated arrangements of Antonio Marangolo and a squad of musicians from Conte's circle, who managed to transplant that languid, knowing, swinging mood into songs that were always well-crafted, despite their simplicity. Though not yet as rich and inspired as in his later work, the lyrics already reveal a curious, sharp approach, heavily influenced at the time by his reading of Tondelli.

Existentialist ballads of disarming sincerity and melancholy strike straight to the heart, largely sketched out on piano, such as "Resta con me", "Una giornata senza pretese" and "Stanco e perduto" (his very first song, written a few years earlier), alongside the sumptuous bandoneon tango of "Scivola vai via". Stories of sleepless nights and drunken binges, of lost loves and loneliness, of bars and the street. Faithful snapshots of the Capossela universe of the time.

The more playful side of the showman, on the other hand, comes to the fore in numbers of infectious, high-proof swing, like the madcap "Pongo sbronzo" and the irresistible title track, which winks at the Sergio Caputo of “Sabato italiano“, con la sua incredibile orgia di cocktail: “Chimay, Bacardi Jamaican rhum/ White Lady, Beck’s bier, tequila bum bum/ Dry gin, Charrington, Four Roses Bourbon”. "The Piano Has Been Drinking (Not Me)", Tom Waits might have protested in his own defence.

All in all, a first-rate debut that immediately marked out the singer-songwriter born in Hannover as one of the brightest new names in Italian songwriting.

In a really seedy bar

green light on the counter

she's wearing red heels and dancing badly

but for the customer buzzing around her

she slowly reveals her goods

though you can tell she's got a belly

(“Notte newyorkese”)

…e allora mambo!

In 1991 came Modì, his second work, titled with a pun that evokes both the French word “maudit” and (above all) the name of the Livorno-born painter Amedeo Modigliani, to whom the album is dedicated. “Modigliani was to me what Jim Morrison was to others,” Capossela would later reveal. “To my eyes he embodied an idea of life, as well as of art. And then there was the beauty with which he sublimated the tragic nature of the figures he painted. The beauty in which his own life was sublimated.”

According to the artist himself, it's an album of tragic love stories that go beyond death, which is also how he explains the choice of a nude figure for the cover. And yet what will make Modì a success are, above all, its carefree, rhythm-packed tracks, like “La regina del Florida” (a magnificent portrait of a slightly faded femme fatale), “Notte newyorkese” (still very much in Waits territory) and “…e allora mambo!”, performed on Paolo Rossi's TV show “Su la testa”, aired that year on Rai 3, and later included in the soundtrack of Lucio Pellegrini's eponymous film (1999).

Capossela's gift for crafting autobiographical ballads is confirmed here, from the aching title track that opens the album, to the moving “Pasionaria” or the soft, Latin-tinged “Ultimo amore”, with its Mexican trumpets front and center. This love affair with Latin America will endure and deepen in his later work.

The songs on Modì sound as if they've drifted out of some hazy provincial piano bar, steeped in feeling, poetry and humour. Capossela's flair as a lyricist is also starting to emerge more forcefully, drawing, much like the Pomona-born master himself, on the nocturnal stories of his club experiences: “In a really seedy bar/ green light on the counter/ she's wearing red heels and dancing badly/ but for the customer buzzing around her/ she slowly reveals her goods/ though you can tell she's got a belly/ rughe cosce lifting trucco/ è una vecchia di sostanza”, he sings in “Notte newyorkese”; “I bagni son zeppi di fumi e ricordi/ che tornano strani e più vivi/ di lei che è lontana/ ma forse m’aspetta/ e vorrebbe qualcosa di più su tutto questo/ la Regina serve al bar/ sembrerebbe che non si possa toccar”, he recounts in “La regina del Florida” (named after the actual club in Modena). But his dark, visionary theatricality is still somewhat caged by Marangolo's “clean” arrangements and by the Fantini clan's production, undeniably influenced by Conte's style.

Modì itself provides the soundtrack for Staino and Altan's film “Non chiamatemi Oscar”, in which Capossela himself takes on a small role. His next undertaking is the music for Paolo Rossi's 1993 theatre show “Pop e Rebelot” (the collaboration between the two would go on to thrive over the years, spanning theatre and TV).

That same year he took part in the tribute album organised by the Club Tenco and dedicated to the great Russian chansonnier Vladimir Visotski, titled “Il volo di Volodja”, contributing the track “Il pugile sentimentale”, destined to become one of the cornerstones of his repertoire, thanks to an irresistible combination of aching Russian melodicism and whirling Balkan brass-band rhythms.

Che cos'è l'amor

it's Ramona stepping onto the field

like a brash broad going for the big score

she shakes it and rattles it

high heels and a low-slung backside

bare belly, writhing away

shaking her head like one possessed

with the connivance of her trusted friend

("Che coss'è l'amor")

Definitive consecration, however, arrives in 1994, when Capossela releases Camera a Sud, which is also his last album arranged by Marangolo and the first to be released abroad, in France. It's a work in which the artist of Irpinian origin begins to place greater emphasis on the intoxicating rhythms of his Southern Italian roots, on the folk songs learned from his guiding spirit Matteo Salvatore (to whom he would later dedicate an entire album, in 2016), on village dances (the thoroughly amusing "Zampanò", which however already carries a whiff of the Balkans), as well as on Latin American musical references, in irresistible numbers like "Guiro" and the unforgettable "Che coss'è l'amor", a bitter, irreverent metaphor for love life in all its most bizarre twists: it would become one of his signature songs, helped along by a brilliant lyric shot through with hilarious flashes of humanity: “Che cos'è l'amor/ it's Ramona stepping onto the field/ like a brash broad going for the big score/ she shakes it and rattles it/ high heels and a low-slung backside/ bare belly, writhing away/ shaking her head like one possessed/ col consesso/ dell’amica sua fidata”. The song gained further popularity from its inclusion in the soundtrack of "Tre uomini e una gamba", the film starring Aldo Giovanni e Giacomo.

Vinicio's music continues to thrive on euphoric contaminations, moving between swing and mambo, tango and twist, marches and ballads. But the original rhythms are always twisted and reworked, in the name of the most wide-ranging cross-pollination and the most irreverent humour. The funk-inflected "Il fantasma delle tre" pushes the tempo even further, while other tracks retain the more intimate, singer-songwriter approach of his early work, from the melancholic "Non è l'amor che va via" to "Il mio amico ingrato", from "Tornando a casa" to the aching ballad of the title track, a languid, tear-jerking bossa nova. The theme of travel remains in the background throughout, tackled with an almost cinematic eye (the nostalgic "Ma l'America") or through autobiographical touches (the portrait of "Amburgo", stamped with Paolo Fresu's trumpet).

The French liaison isn't limited to the album's release: Capossela also performs at the Theatre de la Ville in Paris in 1995. A great concert, but it won't be enough to break through north of the Alps: he'll have to head South to find real success.

I came down with St. Vitus's dance, I no longer had a fixed address, and I tried to talk about fire with my left hand inside a brazier. These were all personal matters, at the moment they were happening.

(Vinicio Capossela)

The tarantella-possessed crooner

1996 is a year of upheaval and rupture. Capossela describes it this way: "It was a period in which I took a lot of risks and smashed everything I had built up until then. And that's because I listened to Jeff Buckley, I read On the Road, I destroyed a marriage, I started hanging around with Chinaski and Rastafarians, I tried, for once, to be young, right at the moment when youth is at its fiercest, the moment when it's dying. So I came down with St. Vitus's dance, I no longer had a fixed address, and I tried to talk about fire with my left hand inside a brazier. These were all personal matters, at the moment they were happening."

With "Chinaski" (his poet friend and inspiration Vincenzo Costantino), Capossela also organizes a reading on the Italian-American writer John Fante, who would become another crucial reference point for him. Another reading would follow, this time a solo one, titled "Accaniti nell'accolita".

The turmoil of his private life also found its way into his musical choices. Capossela doesn't give up on Fantini's production, but changes everything else: with Marangolo let go, he hands musical direction to Luciano Titi, while Carlo Alberto Rossi - one of the leading figures of Turin's new Murazzi scene - is brought in to mix, alongside Davide Graziano and Cato Senatore. But the real turning point lies in the two American guests: Evan Lurie, celebrated jazz musician and founder of the Lounge Lizards, and the towering Marc Ribot, one of the most sought-after guitarists in the world, whom Vinicio had come to appreciate also through his work with Waits.

The result is a powerful, visionary album, Il ballo di San Vito (1996), which consolidates his repertoire, sharpening his focus on the traditions of Italian popular song and Mediterranean folk in general.

Melody gives way to harsh, dissonant tones, but above all to rhythm, the true protagonist of the album. The pandemonium of the title track also unfolds in that same atmosphere of a village feast, amid dances and songs from ancient rural communities: a whirlwind surge of adrenaline that spreads through the whole body like fire, in a masterful fusion of music, vocal modulation and lyrics that merge together to convey the tremor of the tarantula: it's "Ballo di San Vito", the folk name given to an illness with contagious effects.

Capossela once again proves himself a chronicler of everyday lives, of "unassuming" days, of young people from the outskirts, of stories balanced between drama and irony. "Al Veglione" is a delightful little scene of a New Year's Eve party in a small southern Italian town, preserved in a child's memory and rendered like a snapshot from a Federico Fellini film; "Le case" marks a return to the piano-ballad; the relentless "Pioggia di novembre" gives off a mournful, melancholy mood.

But there's also room for touches of reggae ("Body Guard"), pure distillations of aching Cape Verdean morna ("Morna"), scenes of irresistible, caustic humor (the portrait of the unrepentant old men in "L'accolita dei rancorosi" and the unforgettable "Corvo torvo", the two most Waits-like tracks on the record), and yet another hilarious village pantomime in "Contrada Chiavicone", driven by an ever more nervous, urgent rhythm.

It was a memorable evening, so much so that the next day nobody could remember it anymore. It lasted five hours: by the end, the street sweepers must have thought they were dreaming when they saw, in the dead of night, a honking procession emerge with a singer in a fur hat leading the way.

(Vinicio Capossela on "Liveinvolvo")

The reputation of this unrivaled musical storyteller keeps growing, as does interest in his curious, eccentric universe. "The sounds are the backdrop to my imaginary world," Capossela explains, "a world full of trouble, crowded with dazed buskers, noisy streets and old cars." With four wheels, in fact, Capossela has always had an intimate relationship, one born in the years when he wandered around giving his license plate number as an address and taking refuge in garages, gas stations and, above all, in his own car. “La macchina è il nostro transatlantico/ confortevole e familiare…/ è la nostra protesi”, he will sing in "Liveinvolvo", the title track of his first live album. And it's precisely one of those old Volvos with leather seats that gives Liveinvolvo (1998) its title, an overflowing testimony to a night of songs and madness. "It was a memorable evening," its creator recalls, "so much so that the next day nobody could remember it anymore. It lasted five hours: by the end, the street sweepers must have thought they were dreaming when they saw, in the dead of night, a honking procession emerge with a singer in a fur hat leading the way."

But the album also marks a further step forward for this "piano-playing buffoon", who now goes by the name Vic Damone and seems almost like a caricature of a piano-bar singer. His music grows more feverish and complex, moving between fluid piano ballads (including fine covers of Bruno Martino's evergreen "Estate" and João Gilberto's "Cristal"), grimy, clanging blues in Waits's familiar style, and dark sonic progressions. The tracklist also includes a new song, "Scatà scatà (Scatafascio)", the theme tune of the TV show of the same name in which Capossela made his television debut.

His voice is always charged, rough as a grater. But the real surprise is the brass fanfare of Macedonia's Kocani Orkestar, which sets five tracks ablaze. The presence of the Balkan gypsy brass band adds a further touch of blare and sentimentality to his songs. It's a formula revived on a new, intoxicating tour, which wins the singer-songwriter fresh acclaim from both audiences and critics.

Stamped with the famous rooster on its cover, Liveinvolvo is undoubtedly one of the essential works in the discography of the singer-songwriter born in Hannover.

An album dedicated to balloon pioneers, to the daredevils, to sailors in a bottle, to Céline, to Jarry's revolver and, more generally, to everyone who's ever had the courage to take the plunge.

(Vinicio Capossela on "Canzoni a manovella")

The Last New Year's Eve of the Twentieth Century

Capossela spends the following two years amid provincial alleyways and bars, between the simple stories of everyday life and great musical adventures, such as his encounter with the music of Jimmy Scott. Meanwhile, he also takes on an ambitious project: scoring "Tempi moderni", the masterpiece by Charlie Chaplin.

An artistic maturation that reaches full bloom in 2000, with a monumental album: Canzoni a manovella. "It's an album of imaginary songs," Capossela explains, "things that come from deep down, surfacing in diving suit and top hat, a work built with expressive means like the airship techniques I'm so proud of. We used an array of instruments made up of bass drums, a symphony orchestra, tack pianos, a drum roll, trumpets, turbans, Bulgarian weightlifters."

Canzoni a manovella is one of those works that manage to seize the moment and freeze it forever. The moment in which, like a dying man, the 20th century rewinds the entire reel of its own film before the curtain falls, taking with it its whole catalogue of characters, eras, inventions, traditions and cultural styles. And, behind the scenes, there he is, the diver-Capossela, submerged in his diving suit, cranking the handle of this time machine that blurs past and future into an epic worthy of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea". Paradoxical, for someone who once just wanted to be a "confidential singer".

Perhaps it all began with the bender of Liveinvolvo, in the company of the gypsy mariachis of Kočani Orkestar. Of course, there had already been the blaze of Tom Waits setting St. Vitus's dances and other deliria alight, village pantomimes, grim crows and the Chiavicone district. But it's from that live album onward that Capossela definitively steers the wheel toward a voracious ethnomusicology. He arrives at Canzoni a manovella after a long wandering through a small old world, ranging from the southern Mediterranean to Eastern Europe, from the Macedonia of Milcho Manchevski (director of "Before the Rain") to fabled Istanbul, from the rebetiko of Thessaloniki to the polkas of Warsaw. But the spark is also struck by reading the novels of Ferdinand Céline, whose bleak, hyperbolic portrait of the human condition drags Capossela into that dark zeitgeist of a Europe torn apart by wars yet gripped by a feverish pioneering yearning. Just like the ineffable Courtial des Pereires, who in "Death on Credit" invents a hot-air balloon named Zelante; or Bardamu, the doctor-protagonist of "Journey to the End of the Night", to whom the splendid eponymous ballad is dedicated, with its roll piano, strings, bass drum and the fateful closing coup de canon, evoking the dawn of a new era: "The night has passed and the clouds/ swell with Baltic foam and ash". Another literary daredevil, Alfred Jarry, father of the Ubu cycle and of pataphysics, is instead honored by the unsettling march of "Decervellamento", an anthem to the mechanical pillory of the wicked Ubu, set to an estranging Brecht-Weill-style arrangement.

But the 20th century, as we said, is also a century of wars and tragedies, like that of the Jews deported to Auschwitz, documented in Primo Levi's "If This Is a Man". A spectre that tears through the seemingly festive mood of "Suona Rosamunda", in which the famous little tune "Rosamunda" turns into the torture inflicted on the protagonist, a prisoner of her Nazi tormentors forced to play and dance in that carousel of horrors. A track steeped in Yiddish spices, thanks to the contribution of New York Jewish musician Marc Ribot on guitar and Edoardo De Angelis on violin.

In the beginning there was the Crank, the engine-starter, but also the necessary load of wandering contraptions that burn through the air with familiar melodies. The songs thus fill up with bottlephones, toy accordions, symphonic bass drums, tack pianos with roll mechanisms, gramophone-horn trumpets, ondes Martenot, trumpet-violins, timbral smirks somewhere between the circus and the tavern. And so bursts in the most roguish of "Marajà", for a Balkan pandemonium in which the "Thousand and One Nights" turn into a madcap Kusturica film (“Si scompiscia si sganascia si oscureggia il Marajà/ raglia tutta la marmaglia quando raglia il Maraja/ sguaian forte i commensali/ versan gli otri ed i boccali”). The circus is one of Capossela's fatal attractions, fascinated as he is by the greasepaint-smeared mask of "Pagliacci", portrayed in a 3/4-time pantomime driven by a skipping piano and a pump harmonium.

The circus-like swagger doesn't disappear even in the darkest episodes, always reread through a caustic sense of humor. As in the delirious funeral song "Marcia del camposanto", an ode to the religious superstition of the South, crowded with unsettling humanity (gravediggers, the sacristan, the materdomina, the mammanonna, the archpriest, the war-lame lady marshal) and an equally sinister company of nocturnal birds and animals (among which appears one of the future wild beasts of the Cupa, the malogna, a sort of giant badger that populates the Ofanto valley). An irresistible noir appetizer for the future Paese dei Coppoloni, seasoned with Roy Paci's unmistakable brass.

That mocking spirit also brands the first rebetiko infatuation of "Contratto per Karelias", which pines away in the melancholy smoke of George Karelias and Sons cigarettes made in Kalamata, for a story of lost love adapted from a song by the king of Piraeus, Markos Vamvakaris. But the Balkans are also a land of wars, like the one that bloodied Kosovo: Capossela captures it through a single detail, a black train speeding amid the bombs, like a soldier fleeing toward an impossible dawn and a bride with a torn veil who will never return (the anguished "Corre il soldato", built entirely on the dialogue between the usual brass, Giancarlo Bianchetti's guitar solo and Ribot's banjo).

The brine-soaked nursery rhyme of the title track, meanwhile, marks the first dive into that salty lexical universe that will become a leitmotif of the Capossela to come, with a string of dazzling rhymes: “Il tempo è un alambicco/ che piano piano ci cola a picco”, “un lampo brillò a squame/ nell’abisso di verderame”, “si butta il palombaro/ con la sua tuta da calamaro”. But the sounds are brine-soaked too, from Ribot's "siren guitar", amplified with an e-bow, to the clatter of bottles used as percussion, from brass run through a tube for an underwater effect to sonar and other submarine-style effects. And among the crew of the closing choruses even Manuel Agnelli of Afterhours turns up.

Then there's the inevitable chapter of ballads. The gypsy enchantment of the tango "Solo mia" arises from an adaptation of the Macedonian "Bilo cija" by Kočani Orkestar. The fairy-tale waltz of "Pianoforti di Lubecca", put together with Pascal Comelade for piano, toy piano and Edison cylinder roll, is enriched by the voice of Japanese soprano Mayumi Torikoshi, telling of the enchantment of old pianos abandoned in a gunpowder factory that one evening begin to speak and play old, outdated nocturnes. The bluesy serenade of "Signora luna" hurls Leopardi-esque imagery into a metaphysical western worthy of "Dead Man", thanks to Ribot's spectral guitars and the obsessive double bass of Ares Tavolazzi. The waltz "Nella pioggia", drenched in melancholy and strings, is an ode to beloved Milan, which "shines with iron and railway tracks", with the ceaseless coming and going of its trams and trains. The closing "Resto qua" is instead a lump-in-the-throat snapshot of the end of a show, with strings filtered through an old gramophone, carousel sounds and fireworks. Finally, the poignant 1950s-style rumba "Con una rosa" is actually an outtake: it wasn't a canzone a manovella, but Capossela added it to the tracklist anyway, captivated by its melodic grandeur, which slides majestically between congas, strings and jazzy guitars.

Vinicio Capossela looks at the world through a porthole (see the album cover) and gives back an image of overflowing, Felliniesque creativity, assisted by a squad of top-tier musicians and the skillful direction of Tommaso Vittorini, the album's orchestrator and arranger. Monumental and certainly not an easy listen, but built with expressive means lighter than air, Canzoni a manovella is the crowbar with which Capossela pries open the last resistance of a critical establishment that, from here on, will start to venerate him almost unconditionally.

In 2003 his first compilation, L'Indispensabile, is also released. An initiative the singer-songwriter from Hannover doesn't take well to: "Obscure forces govern the constellations of the record business," he points out. "I told my label I had three albums ready, but they told me it was better to do a recap of the past first... When the need for this release arose within the record company, I didn't take it well, I started touching wood and warding off bad luck, in short, it felt a bit premature to me, but in the end I came to terms with it, and, I told myself, if an anthology absolutely has to come out, better it comes out while I'm still alive..."

Among the eighteen tracks: classics like "Il ballo di San Vito", "Marajà", "Che cossè l'amor", "...e alllora mambo", "All'una e trentacinque circa", "Con una rosa", "Modì", "Scivola vai via", plus one precious previously unreleased track: a beautiful cover of "Si è spento il sole", a song recorded in 1958 by a very young Adriano Celentano and transfigured by Capossela into an almost tex-mex key, in the style of Calexico.

Dov’è che siam restati soli Nutless

where the walls closed in

muri che avevamo costruito nella sabbia e per la sabbia

maybe just to keep the wave within reach

(“Dove siamo rimasti a terra Nutless”)

Casting off

In 2006 came Ovunque proteggi, his first album of new material in six years. To mark the occasion, the Italian from Hannover also took a hand in production, surrounding himself with an all-star cast of musicians including Mario Brunello (cello), Roy Paci (trumpet), Marc Ribot (guitars), Stefano Nanni (piano), Ares Tavolazzi (formerly of Area) on double bass, and Gak Sato on electronics.

Master Vinicio's circus, then, throws open its doors again, doing so with “Dalla parte di Spessotto” (a hymn to a childhood lived as a “loser,” if not quite as Pinocchio's Lampwick). A bizarre title for a single that renews the farcical mockery of the previous album with lyrics that are – as ever – hilarious. Capossela hams it up in his own inimitable way amid skipping rhythms and assorted divertissements. It almost sounds like another “hand-cranked song,” yet the first dark omens of what's to come also surface (“L’oscurità/ come un gendarme già/mi afferra l’anima”). Indeed, the euphoric futurist fresco of Canzoni a manovella gives way here to a dark, threatening journey through nightmares and storms. Right from the vocabulary used, the contrast is evident between the physical, bodily dimension (blood, flesh, heads, punches to the jaw, bones, thighs, guts, brains…) and a mystical impulse (souls, blessings, crucifixes, shrouds, rosaries…) never before heard in Capossela's songbook. The thirteen tracks form, in turn, a pilgrimage through space and time, between mythical places (Troy, the Colosseum of the ancient Romans) and real ones (post-socialist Moscow, the Asia of “Lanterne Rosse”). An anxious journey in search of rest and protection, as the album's very title suggests.

It opens with “Non trattare,” an Arabic-tinged dirge that brushes against a certain delirious mysticism reminiscent of Ferretti (its source is a psalm from Scripture), before plunging straight into the abyss of “Brucia Troia,” which Vinicio wanted as a single because “it would be a smash hit on radio dedication shows” (!) and which is instead a horror-struck swoon over the Homeric myth, recorded in the Ispinigoli karst cave in Sardinia together with Ribot and three Sardinian tenors. Equally grim is the evocation of Roman circus rites in “Al Colosseo” (a tribute to maestro Waits's “In The Colosseum”), with Capossela's usual deranged declaiming over a bed of trumpets and drum rolls worthy of “Ben Hur.”

Among the album's new features is a more pronounced use of electronics, courtesy of guru Gak Sato, most tangible in “Moskavalza,” a techno-souvenir of the Russian capital, drowned in rivers of vodka and built on an amusing pastiche of lyrical assonances. Still, there's no shortage of dives back into Capossela's more “hedonistic” past, the one that thrives on cha-cha-cha tomfoolery as in “Medusa,” the village-fair revelry of “L’uomo vivo,” and lavish Broadway-style music-hall numbers (“Nel blu”). And – besides the guiding star of Waits – the moustache of the most jazzy of counts still peeks through with his little dixieland orchestra amid the notes of the nostalgic (and delightful) “Dove siamo rimasti a terra Nutless,” a reflection on time and how we live it, between inertia and action, which pays homage to “C'era una volta in America” by Sergio Leone, quoting the character of Noodles: “Dov’è che siam restati soli Nutless/ dov’è che i muri si sono chiusi addosso/ muri che avevamo costruito nella sabbia e per la sabbia/ maybe just to keep the wave within reach”. Lines that recall the scene in which Noodles, by the seaside with Max, tells his friend he thinks it's madness for him to want to risk everything to get rich all over again.

Melodically less inspired than Canzoni a manovella, Ovunque proteggi pays the price above all in its ballads (the Mexican traditional “Pena da l’alma,” the piano-led “Lanterne rosse,” and the closing title track itself), losing a bit of steam after its pyrotechnic start. But Capossela had kept an ace up his sleeve, playing it on the penultimate track, “S.S. dei naufragati”: the album's dramatic climax, inspired by Melville's “Moby Dick” and Coleridge's “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (and already recorded on a Banda Ionica album). A litany for cello, harmonium, choir and theremin, rising to the sky from the hold of a vessel swallowed by the waves, amid rotting timber and spirits of the dead.

Mad, chaotic, even overloaded with ideas and sounds, Ovunque proteggi is the boldest album Capossela could have made after the smash success of Canzoni a manovella. Its few weak spots are easily forgiven in the face of such creativity and daring.

On the following On his own (2008), Capossela brings in even more narrative variety: set to music is a wealth of joys and sorrows, love and war, the circus, Christmas and even lost socks. As if wanting to pour out everything he has inside in that single moment. That this leads to more than one tedious moment of deja vù is thus a perverse side effect: “In clandestinità” quotes “Nutless,” “Vetri appannati d’America” quotes “Bardamù,” “Il paradiso dei calzini” quotes “Buonanotte fiorellino.”

As for the sound, the many styles simply remain just that, failing to actually implement the content and merely dressing it up. Such is the case with the rough-and-ready big band of “Una giornata perfetta” or the pianistic noir of “Dall’altra parte della sera.” What lends greater depth are perhaps the guests, such as Calexico, who add color via horns to “La faccia della terra,” or perhaps the happy inspiration drawn from “Deserter's Song” in “Sante Nicola.”

It's the endless circus epic “Il gigante e il mago” that captures the album's problems, bogging down in ditches of childish sappiness. New paths are opened, instead, by “Parla piano,” half Tenco, half Sanremo, which offers the most melodically open-hearted hook in Capossela's entire songbook.

Of course, as with any self-respecting imperfect album, there are peaks of real stature. Two elegies, two intersections of passion and despair: “Orfani ora” and “Lettere di soldati.” The soft notes of the fine “Non c’è disaccordo nel cielo” only deepen the bitterness over what could have been and isn't.

Capossela paused to cast a glance at the world, internalizing and externalizing emotions, shelving some of the irony to speak more directly. On his own is more the record of a singer-songwriter than of a musician, somewhat like Nick Cave's “No More Shall We Part”: a shame that the result is more a step backward than anything else.

His frenetic live activity provided the material for filmed documentation, as in the case of the two live albums Nel niente sotto il sole (2007) and Solo show (2009).

Meanwhile, his extra-musical activities also continued, taking on an ever greater weight in his journey as an artist without borders. As early as 2004 he had published his first novel, “Non si muore tutte le mattine”, from which he drew a shadow-theatre show and the Radiocapitolazioni broadcast on Radio 3. In 2009, again for Feltrinelli, he released “In clandestinità”, co-written with his friend and poet Vincenzo Costantino “Cinaski”, a book that later became a reading staged with a boxing ring, a judge, a piano and the two of them on stage, for an improbable boxing match in which words and songs took the place of punches.

In 2010 came The Story-Faced Man, an anthology for the international market, already released in England and Ireland by the prestigious Nonesuch Records and in the United States. It was the prelude to a tour that would take him through England, the United States and Canada. A full-fledged international breakthrough for Capossela, who had already been dubbed, across the Channel, “Italy’s greatest rock star” by the Sunday Times and “Italy’s most intriguing musical traveler” by Mojo magazine.

And what is it about the appearance of the dead that terrifies

if not the pallor

White shroud-colored?

Specters and ghosts immersed in milky mists…

And the sea in its abyssal call

In the Antarctic, boundless white cemetery, the white

sneers in its moments of ice

The thought of nothingness yawns open in the milky depths of the sky…

White the insomnia white, death white and white is fear is white

The vacuous, colorless universe

Stands before us like a leper

This too is the whiteness of the whale

(“The whiteness of the whale”)

Hunt for Moby Dick

In 2011, with Sailors, prophets and whales, Capossela returns to his best form. Having left on shore whatever remained of his (already scant) sense of restraint, the former Corvo Torvo embarks on nothing less than a "Marina Commedia". An epic work, indeed a "cyclopedic" one, split into two CD-volumes — "one oceanic, the other Homeric and Mediterranean" — poised between music and literature. More a theatrical musical than an album, an hour and a half long and overflowing with nineteen songs steeped in myth, poetry and sea-salt. Capossela, a new Ulysses, sails among ghost ships, sirens, octopuses, bearded seals, whales, white sharks, madonnas of the seashells and seraphim "with marble eyes". A literary and, inevitably, metaphysical odyssey, confirming the heightened spiritual vocation of the recent Capossela.

The opening port of call, then, can only be the belly of "Il Grande Leviatano", the terrible sea monster described by Job as "king over all the proudest beasts" (Old Testament, 41, 1-20/24-27). A lyrical, solemn declamation for piano, organ and choir, with lyrics drawn from a passage of Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" ("Ribs & Terrors in the Whale"), translated by Cesare Pavese.

Vinicio seems to have definitively devoted himself to a universal music-hall, where song becomes theatre and vice versa. Thus recitation and spoken word — inaugurated starting with Ovunque proteggi — take centre stage. With less feverish tones, save for a few notable exceptions, such as the Melvillian apocalypse of "I fuochi fatui" and above all the majestic, terrifying apologue of "La bianchezza della balena", inspired by another passage from "Moby Dick". It's the album's masterpiece, its lyrical climax, with the imposing children's choir of the Mitici Angioletti sharpening the pathos.

More frequent, however, are the playful moments: from the nursery rhyme in "mermaid-speak" of "Pryntil", a kind of "In fondo al mar" straight out of a 1930s gramophone, with the Sorelle Marinetti stealing the show (though with the shadow of Céline's "Scandalo negli abissi" lurking nearby), to the finely calibrated divertissement for xylophone and choir of "Lord Jim" (Conrad's fallible hero), from the medieval jig of "L'oceano, Oilalà" to the swaying dance amid the tentacles of "Polpo d'amor", a distillate of Calexico's black ink, passing through the tavern choruses of "Billy Budd", a piratical blues embellished by Marc Ribot's guitar flourishes, and the noisy delirium of a drunken Polyphemus, rendered in a brilliant neologism ("Vinocolo"), right up to the liquid (and somewhat predictable) "Calipso". But the album's centre of gravity also lies in sparer episodes, small hand-finished melodic miniatures — the ancestral elegy of "Aedo", plucked on the lyre's strings just steps from the Cave of Zeus (Crete), the enchanted music-box of "Madonna delle conchiglie", protector of sailors, the delicate filigree of "Dimmi Tiresia", an ode to the seer steeped in Hamlet-like doubts — confirming Capossela's distinctive gift for fine craftsmanship.

Somewhat disappointing, on the other hand, is the long farewell of "Le Sirene", which drags wearily along on piano, voice and violins, as do, more generally, all the tracks that indulge in ballad form, a mode in which Capossela has for some time struggled to excel.

More than the details, it's the whole that counts. After the misstep of On his own, Capossela redeems himself with a titanic, overflowing work, one that listening on record can only partially convey in its full complexity: indeed, even more unmissable will be its choreographic staging on the many Italian theatre stages where Capossela's ship will dock.

With Sailors, prophets and whales, in October 2011, Vinicio Capossela won his fourth Targa Tenco, after those already earned for his debut All'una e trentacinque circa (1991), for Canzoni a manovella (2001) and Ovunque proteggi (2006). Practically a record, confirming a talent with no rivals on the contemporary singer-songwriter scene.

While the world watches Greece with bated breath over the well-known events tied to the global economic crisis, Capossela dedicates an entire album to it, one that is much more than a tribute. It's an inner rebellion, the reclaiming of a cultural identity that transcends the contingencies of current events. An album "played in Greek", out of a debt to the land that "gave civilization to the world" and "one of the most extraordinary urban musics in the world: rebetiko". It is precisely this genre, born in the blazing Thessaloniki of the 1930s by blending Hellenic, Byzantine and Ottoman tradition, that is the latest ethnomusicological passion of the wandering gypsy Capossela, roaming the Aegean in search of zithers, bouzoukis and old scores long buried under the dust of time.

Recorded on analogue tape at the historic Sierra studios in Athens, Rebetiko Gymnastas contains four new tracks, a ghost-track, and eight Capossela classics reinterpreted in a rebetiko key. Backed by a roster of highly respected musicians, including some illustrious Greek rebetes, among them Manolis Pappos, grand master of the bouzouki.

The new tracks are especially convincing: "Rebetiko Mou" is an individual exercise in rebetiko philosophy, with those indolent cadences also typical of sirtaki, wrapped in an evocative tangle of plucked strings; "Misirlou", entrusted to the raspy voice of Kaiti Ntali, reinvents the genre's best-known hit, made famous in its electric guitar version on the soundtrack of "Pulp Fiction"; "Abbandonato" is a free interpretation, rendered into Italian, of a song by Atahualpa Yupanqui, with the bouzouki to the fore; while "Cancion de las simples cosas" is an Italian version of the poignant classic already performed by Mercedes Sosa and Chavela Vargas.

The previously released tracks, on the other hand, go by without too many surprises, with the notable exception of "Contratto per Karelias", which even in its original version drew on the rebetiko imagination by reworking a song by the Greek Markos Vamvakaris, and which here is elevated by its instrumental setting, though it loses a bit of momentum. The disorienting ghost track, finally, is an unreleased Italian-Greek duet version of Tony Dallara's "Come Prima".

After the odyssey of Prophetic sailors and whales, the landing in the Greek harbour has a sweet, melancholy flavour. But the spread, for once, can wait.

He would also dedicate to Greece the film "Indebito" (2013) and the book "Tefteri, taccuino dei conti in sospeso" (2013).

La Cupa is the dark district, the one where the sun barely shines, the one where things hide from view. The one where illicit loves are consummated, the one where the creatures people wish to conceal from sight become real. Those who come to open the door for him will come to torment you, just as they have tormented me all these years. Digging into the earth, one reaches back to the dawn of time. It's frightening, yet it also enchants. Too bad for everyone.

(Vinicio Capossela on “Le canzoni della Cupa”)

A southern epic

In the summer of 2013 Capossela presents a new show in the magnificent setting of Villa Adriana, “Il Carnevale degli Animali e altre bestie d’amore”, in which he stars alongside the Trio Amadei and soloists from the Vianiner Philarmoniker. Also in 2013 he makes his debut as a producer with the album “Primo Ballo della Banda della Posta”, a collection of wedding music with which he tours for more than fifty dates. On the theme of marriage, he also builds the first edition of the Calitri Sponz Fest (2013), a festival he conceived and for which he serves as artistic director. The festival returns in the summer of 2014 with the theme “Mi sono sognato il treno” and in the summer of 2015 with the theme “Le vie dei muli i sentieri dei miti”.

In April 2015 Feltrinelli publishes his fourth book, “Il paese dei Coppoloni”, shortlisted for the Premio Strega. In June 2015 he turns out to be the most-voted author from Dante at the Strega prize. On August 29th, as part of the Sponz fest, he celebrates his Notte d’argento for twenty-five years in music: a huge concert with special guests, lasting more than seven hours at the Conza station in Alta Irpinia, the prelude to a celebratory tour titled “Qu’Art de Siècle”, which takes him to perform in Italy (Catania, Milan, Rome and Venice) and in major European cities (Paris, London, Berlin, Brussels, Zurich, Bern, Thessaloniki) in a series of one-off concert-events with varying guests and setlists.

The book “Il paese dei Coppoloni” comes with a companion documentary produced by LaEffe and directed by Stefano Obino titled “Vinicio Capossela – Nel paese dei Coppoloni”, released in cinemas in January 2016, whose soundtrack is drawn from what is announced as his forthcoming new studio album. The record comes out on May 5th and is a bold, daring new gamble.

Canzoni della Cupa (2016) is an album born from the land. A dark, ancestral land, steeped in rural myths lost in the mists of time. Namely, Alta Irpinia, his father's homeland, already staged by Capossela in Il paese dei Coppoloni and in his Sponz Fest, which now becomes the lifeblood of an album split into two parts, “Polvere” and “Ombra”, the first recorded in 2003, the second between 2014 and 2015.

A folkloric epic with nothing reassuring about it, because – as Bob Dylan once claimed – “traditional music is made of thorns, of nocturnal creatures, of blood, of mysterious things”. A notion that fits perfectly with the Cupa (“the dark district”), that part of the South where the sun almost never shines and where the folk bestiary feeds on diabolical spirits and mysterious apparitions. Like the midday demon of “La bestia nel grano”, who appears at noon to warn us that the point of maximum light is actually a slit opening onto the world of shadow. Or else it's the animals that embody the face of the unfathomable, of the sacred, perhaps disguised in the monstrous guise of “Pumminale”, the sinister werewolf of Puglia celebrated by Salvatore, whom Capossela draws on to probe the chasms of the human soul.

But class conflict also claims its share, with women often at center stage: from peasant women born “wild” to the “Femmine” who go to harvest tobacco in the fields (“partite in due e tornate in quattro”), from the devout “Maddalena la castellana” to the more freewheeling “Franceschina la calitrana”, who carries on with the railway foreman, from the mistress of the farmstead (“La padrona mia”), an unattainable object of desire, to the ineffable “Pettarossa la puttanazza”, a new Bocca di Rosa who “fa del bene ai suoi paesani”.

The first half, “Polvere”, is a long journey that begins in Cabras, in a western-like Sardinia, and passes through the encounter with the Apulian minstrel Matteo Salvatore and his razor-sharp language, a storyteller of ordinary people's lives, of abuses and injustices, but also of an unnamed heritage of everyday songs: sonnets, ballads, serenades and military choruses. Sixteen tracks recorded in 2003 for a lean sound, faithful to the folk orthodoxy of Cantacronache and Dischi del Sole, yet enriched by a host of ethnic instruments (accordion, cubba cubba, vihuela, drums, etc.).

Here, the Cupa is still a distant dimension, even though it's evoked by the deathly ode of “Il lamento dei mendicanti”. But most of the stories unfold under the sun of the southern latifundium, amid plantations and railways, in a boundless village festival. Lightening the crossing is his usual biting irony and the ever-sardonic tone of the former Vic Damone. And ultimately it's his trademark as a performer that makes this ancient miscellany distinctive: age-old zumpa-zumpa tunes (“Faccia di corno”, “Zompa la rondinella”, “Rapatatumpa”), universal traditional songs (how many times have we already heard the tune of “L’acqua chiara alla fontana”?), and intoxicating village dances, like the irreverent “Pettarossa” or the picaresque “Nachecici”, with its plainly fatalistic message (“Chi muore muore/ chi campa campa /e nu piatto di maccaruni cu’ la carna”).

The two nocturnal, intimate ballads that close the first part (“La lontananza” and “La notte è bella da soli”, in which we can already hear the werewolf's howl) serve as the ideal bridge into the magical darkness of “Ombra”, the album's second half. Here we find the most singer-songwriter-oriented tracks, recorded in a mobile studio that hosted guests such as Giovanna Marini, Calexico, Howe Gelb, Los Lobos and Flaco Jimenez. This is the part of the album closest to the recent Capossela, the one of “Sailors, prophets and whales“. And, truth be told, some tracks almost feel like outtakes from that other sprawling collection (the frayed blues of “Scorza di mulo”, the dreamy litany of “Le creature della Cupa”, the secular prayer of “L’angelo della luce”), but some of his classic melodies also resurface, like that of “Canzoni a manovella”, reworked in an Irpinia-flavored update as the newly written “Maddalena la castellana”.

Striking are the desert-like vistas that open up in “La notte di San Giovanni” and in the mournful Morricone-esque western of “Il treno”, placed at the close, as if to symbolically carry away all the protagonists, as does the mariachi mirage of “Componidori”, a slice of Mexico carved out in Cabras, deep in Sardinia, for a sort of Dionysian ritual in which a man, surrounded by women, comes to understand that “è meglio fottere che comandare”. But the candlelit ballad (or rather, moonlit) of “Il Pumminale”, the first single released, also works perfectly.

We reach the finish line a little worn out, but happily drunk, just like after the collective bender of “Lo sposalizio di Maloservizio”. An adventure that is literary and (once again) theatrical, even before being musical. Although there's no doubt about Capossela's effort to transfigure folk material through his flair as a revered master storyteller. From a compositional standpoint, the twenty-eight tracks don't add much to his musical arsenal, which has settled for some years now into a kind of all-encompassing folk recital. But that's Capossela today: take it or leave it. And we, once again, wholeheartedly take it.

And to the objection that will perhaps follow him forever, let's let him answer for himself: “Ho esagerato? Sì, è certamente vero. Ma la vita non esagera, forse?”.

In 2019 Capossela returns with an album, Ballads for men and beasts, in which the downtrodden are the protagonists of the story. Forgotten, outraged figures, enslaved by a human condition that over the centuries has never managed to shake off its own bestiality, its being always and in any case the executioner of itself. And it's precisely “Il povero Cristo” that is the first single released by the singer-songwriter, whose video was shot in Riace and stars Spanish actor Enrique Irazoqui in the role of Jesus, a role the same actor had already played in the famous 1964 film by Pier Paolo Pasolini, “Il Vangelo secondo Matteo”.

It's a folk tale in which Capossela imagines the return of Christ, who, once stepped down from his own cross, is once again disappointed by the human condition, by our congenital inability to live while respecting our fellow man. A track that immediately reveals the mood of the record, with Capossela in the guise of a preacher who is calm but deeply disappointed by what surrounds him. Opening "Ballads for men and beasts", however, is "Uro", a song drawing its lifeblood from the earliest cave paintings in the Lascaux grottoes. A tribute to humankind's age-old need to communicate with itself and with others, resulting in a dark-toned track written together with his friend Teho Teardo (on guitar), with Vincenzo Vasi on marimba.

However, between one tale and another ("Perfetta letizia", inspired by Saint Francis), one eye on the sacred and the other on the profane, Capossela also manages to draw close to the present in the fiery trot of "La peste", turning his attention to the modern age, with the web seen as a viral disease afflicting us all. Capossela sings of "inert revolt" and "fake news", lashing out against the ever more exponentially growing scourge of social media. A return to the present that makes the album thematically dynamic, just as the structure of each individual track proves versatile, each with its own mood and rhythm. Among them are aching ballads in which the sinner's suffering is probed (“Ma ogni uomo uccide quel che ama/ Questo sia bene udito/ Alcuni con sguardo amaro, altri con parlar forbito/ Il codardo lo fa con un bacio, con la spada lo fa l’ardito/ Con la spada lo fa l’ardito”, from "Ballata del carcere di Reading"), even attempting to exorcise it, while Raffaele Tiseo's viola and Daniele Sepe's (magical) flute aim to console both soul and body. A marvel repeated in the splendid "La giraffa di Imola", a song that tells of a giraffe escaped from the circus ("Cucciolo senza madre/ Perso nel circo dell'Europa Occidentale") who finds herself running through streets of concrete, sheet metal and zebra crossings.

Ballads for men and beasts gives us a singer-songwriter who, once again, proves inspired, far from clichés, fashionable references and forced escapism. A free artist, who reconnects with man and his being also, and above all, a beast, through songs that soar across time and space with the pathos of someone who is fully aware of the misery of a West increasingly incapable of remembering its own dimension and of embracing mother earth in what will forever remain the only truly redemptive embrace.

In 2023 Capossela returns with a new album, Thirteen urgent songs, in which he tackles just as many topics of pressing current relevance.  Like a modern-day Virgil, he plunges down with us into the everyday hell of gastronomy elevated to the only form of socializing ("All You Can Eat"), into the distortions of a system of power that considers itself untouchable ("Ariosto Governatore"), into a politics no longer able to be truly representative ("Dalla parte del torto"), into the violence carried out because of a distorted vision of love and sexuality ("La cattiva educazione").

The most urgent song, "La crociata dei bambini", released ahead of the rest of the album on the day marking the first anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, tackles the theme of war. It does so through the eyes of the children and the dog accompanying them, as recounted in Bertolt Brecht's novel.

In almost every track, Capossela draws on the suggestions and reflections of illustrious literary authors. This isn't mere name-dropping, but rather gratitude towards that immense cultural heritage left by those who have already tried to point us towards a direction worth striving for.

The risk, on Thirteen urgent songs, is that the urgency to denounce and narrate might overwhelm the musical side of things. This sometimes happens: on the first single there's so much, too much, to say, and the piano and strings are left simply to accompany the adventures of these wandering children amid the rubble of a devastated Poland. The idea underpinning the album, however, allows each track to be approached as its own self-contained microcosm, granting the author total freedom in the structure of the songs. So we find the circus-like atmospheres of Canzoni a manovella resurfacing in "Il tempo dei regali", awash with brass, organ and glockenspiel, and the festive, overflowing madness of Ovunque proteggi in "Gloria all'archibugio". And then there's also a cha cha cha, onomatopoeically rebranded cha cha chaf, celebrating the joy of children splashing in a puddle; a ramshackle swing number with caustic satire worthy of the best Tom Waits on "All You Can Eat"; a song of social protest in "Minorità", which tackles the dramatic state of the prison system; and the extraordinary lyricism of "Staffette in bicicletta", sung together with Mara Rederghieri.

The collaborations are countless: besides the longtime musicians who have often accompanied him, Capossela lets Margherita Vicario open the aching "La cattiva educazione", dedicated to women who are victims of femicide, with a paraphrase of the Resistance anthem: "Questa mattina non mi son svegliata/e l'invasore ce l'avevo in casa". On "Sul divano occidentale" we find Raiz, Oliver Skardy and Bunna on backing vocals, and FiloQ on synths. The latter, who also produces the track, invites the singer-songwriter of Irpinian origins to explore territory he's rarely ventured into before, such as dub and electronic music.

On Thirteen urgent songs you won't find easy slogans or magic formulas to solve the issues being addressed. But, like a patient craftsman, Capossela searches for the right words, smooths them out, polishes them, and puts them in service of the music.

Somewhat surprisingly, just a year later he releases Sciusten Feste N.1965, an album that could be described as a Christmas record, at least in his own particular way. It brings together a mix of new songs and holiday classics reinterpreted with a personal, ironic twist. "Bianco Natale", for instance, takes on dark, unsettling tones, with Capossela singing over a tense, tormented musical backing, while "Campanelle" is a swinging "Jingle Bells" complete with 1950s-style backing vocals. The reinterpretation of "Santa Claus is Coming to Town" is particularly biting, featuring a Santa Claus who shoots himself behind a supermarket, alluding to how hard it is for him to keep up with the extreme consumerism of the holidays. The album also includes traditional songs reworked with Capossela's unmistakable touch ("Conforto e gioia", "Il friscaletto") and a "Neapolitan-style" cover of Tom Waits's "Christmas Card From A Hooker In Minneapolis" ("Charlie"). 

All in all, the album flows along lightly and pleasantly, mostly evoking the atmospheres of his previous albums, without any major stylistic upheavals.  The presence of a sizeable cast of musicians enriches the album, among whom Marc Ribot stands out, his guitar lending extra sparkle to "Voodoo Mambo" – a track that's not about Christmas but inspired by the Day of the Dead – with a long litany of bones that brings out one of Capossela's liveliest, most theatrical performances.  It's a work that intrigues, perhaps not so much for the overall value of the piece but because, with its festive liveliness mixed with melancholy, it rekindles the poetic, jester-like vein that has always set apart the career of the artist born in Hannover.

Contributions by Ciro Frattini ("On his own"), Giuliano Delli Paoli ("Ballads for men and beasts"), Fabio Ferrara ("Thirteen urgent songs", "Sciusten Feste N.1965")

Short bibliography

Enrico Deregibus – Dizionario completo della canzone italiana (Giunti, 2006)

Massimo Padalino – Il ballo di San Vinicio (Arcana, 2009)

Laura Rizzo – Canzoni a manovella – Vinicio Capossela (Arcana, 2015)

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