Claudio Baglioni

Few conditions are as demanding as freedom. Fresh from the commercial triumph of "La vita è adesso" and the vast solo tour immortalized on "Assolo", between 1987 and 1990 the nearly forty-year-old Claudio Baglioni found himself immersed in a phase of exceptional creativity coupled with productive paralysis, brought on not by external limitations but, quite the opposite, by their almost total absence.
"Oltre", the double album that blossomed out of that singular period, was the result of recording sessions in eight different studios, involving more than thirty musicians, among them internationally acclaimed artists such as Paco de Lucía, Richard Galliano, Yossou N'Dour, and Pino Daniele. Over the three years the album took to make, the singer-songwriter worked up material for forty songs and rewrote the lyrics for the entire record no fewer than three times over — not for lack of inspiration, but out of that insidious perfectionism that can grip anyone who answers to no judge but themselves.

The Price of Freedom

In a quintessentially Italian paradox, the three great qualities that make Baglioni a unique figure among the singer-songwriters who emerged from the Seventies are also the very ones that have cost him credibility within the scene. Where the expressive power of the major names of that generation was tied to an honest acknowledgment of their vocal limitations, unadorned melodies, and plain, informal lyrics, Baglioni sacrificed his own critical standing by cultivating, album after album, a formal care for meter and rhyme, an overflowing love of melody, and a vocal range well outside the norm.
"Too pop", in short — and undoubtedly too romantic to win over listeners raised on protest and dissent, but perfect for filling stadiums: the 1982 "Alé-oo" tour was the first to systematically target big sports arenas, to accommodate the crowds drawn by songs already regarded as immortal at the time ("Questo piccolo grande amore", "Strada facendo", "E tu", "Avrai", "Sabato pomeriggio", "E tu come stai?"). The exceptional popular success of "La vita è adesso" (1985), however, gave Baglioni the chance to break free of his image as a "sentimental singer", and starting with the 1986 tour he chose to gamble on unexpected formats. The triple album "Assolo" (1986) documents a season of major transformation for the Roman artist, who chose to perform alone on stage, playing every instrument himself and making heavy use of live-programmed sequencers, as well as the then-pioneering MIDI protocol to link up the various electronic devices involved in the performances.

A key collaborator in this risky experiment was Pasquale Minieri, a musician and sound engineer with a background in frontier projects such as Canzoniere del Lazio and Carnascialia, as well as the architect of the ethno-pop sound of Teresa Di Sio's "Africana". The partnership proved effective — the cross-pollination Baglioni was after found a perfect match in Minieri's expertise in technology and experimental music — and when the time came to start thinking about the next album, it felt natural for the singer-songwriter to seek Minieri's support once again.

Home Retreats and Real World

Work began in 1988, when Baglioni retreated to a house in Ansedonia with nothing but the music of "Mille giorni di te e di me" (then conceived as an orchestral ballad) and a working title for the record: "A presto". The compositional approach he adopted was unusual: rather than developing complete songs, the singer-songwriter put together hundreds of self-contained fragments — piano themes or 20-30 second guitar flashes — which he then handed over to Minieri, who had moved to Ansedonia to live with him. Over the course of a year and a half, the two selected, reworked, and assembled the structure of at least twice as many songs as would eventually make the album.
Between June and July 1988, the pair stayed in Bath, in the UK, home to the brand-new Real World studios conceived by Peter Gabriel. While the former Genesis frontman (who had recently become a global star thanks to the success of "So") completed the recording of "Passion", Minieri and Baglioni made the most of the constant flow of musicians passing through to shape the sonic architecture of the songs. The sessions featured key names from Peter Gabriel's circle, including drummer Manu Katché, bassists Pino Palladino, John Giblin, and Tony Levin, guitarist David Rhodes, as well as Italians Celso Valli, keyboardist and arranger, and jazz pianist Danilo Rea, who had long worked alongside Minieri.

Most of the instrumental backbone of the songs was laid down during those months, in some cases reaching a form close to definitive. "Le mani e l'anima", one of the album's most intimate and evocative tracks despite its off-beat groove, left the studio with an arrangement that was essentially complete, and was only later enriched by a vocal contribution from Senegalese mbalax innovator Youssou 'N Dour — who recorded his part in a single night in Rome, given free rein to improvise. The synth arpeggio of "Io dal mare", meanwhile, comes with a telling anecdote about the atmosphere at Real World Studios. Passing through during a break from recording "Passion", E-Street Band keyboardist David Sancious heard the broad half-time groove laid down by Palladino and Katché, over which Baglioni's voice entered on the anacrusis (consistently anticipating the start of each bar), and was struck by a melodic idea. He mentioned it to Minieri, who encouraged him to put it forward. Instantly approved, this spur-of-the-moment contribution is faithfully credited on the song.

Baglioni and Gabriel's artistic closeness continued when both took part in the "Human Rights Now!" concert promoted by Amnesty International in Turin in September 1988. Accounts from the time report that Baglioni's performance on that occasion was met with fierce hostility from the crowd, despite Gabriel coming on stage to show his support for the artist. The unpleasant episode convinced the singer-songwriter to withdraw from live performing altogether and focus on the album, for which his ambitions grew even more sweeping: it had to be his masterpiece, the ultimate achievement in sonic craftsmanship, breadth of vision, and expressive freedom.

A European Tour, in the Studio

Throughout 1989, recording continued across multiple Italian and European studios. During the sessions at Studio Grande Armée in Paris, Katché introduced Baglioni and Minieri to jazz accordionist Richard Galliano, who contributed to two of the project's most freewheeling, folk-flavoured tracks, "Io, lui e la cana femmina" and "Navigando". "Io dal mare" was set to feature Pino Daniele, but the musician was in a hurry due to an upcoming heart operation: keen on the collaboration with Baglioni, he insisted and was visited in Formia to record his part — an interplay of acoustic notes and scat singing that serves as a coda to the song.

The collaboration with Paco de Lucía on "Domani mai" instead followed a more measured pace: having gone to the studio once, the legendary flamenco guitarist listened to the backing track and asked for a CD copy to study it, promising to return a week later with his part. With a verse built on a reworking of the Andalusian iv-V-IV-III cadence and a chorus driven by the so-called lament bass — a chromatic descent of the bass note, moving semitone by semitone from the tonic to the dominant — the song lends itself naturally to the Spanish virtuoso's contribution. After the agreed week had passed, the recording was done in a single take (at the end of which, Minieri recalls, the musician said something like: "Well, I don't know if I could have played it any better...").

It was for "Domani mai" that a first round of orchestral sessions took place in Rome, conducted by Celso Valli. The other arrangement recorded on that occasion was for "La piana dei cavalli bradi", the album's penultimate track and almost a mirror image of "Io dal mare" (placed second in the tracklist): similar in its halftime rhythmic construction, with the drum pattern built on two rhythmic cells rather than one, and similar in the sense of harmonic openness created by an abundance of suspended, extended and inverted chords. The song's introduction, with Paolo Gianolio's guitar joining Katché and Palladino's drums and bass to build great waves of density and rarefaction, almost seems to anticipate the enveloping grandeur that Peter Gabriel would make the foundation of "Us" (1992).

Two-faced voices

On closer inspection, the styles of Claudio Baglioni and Peter Gabriel are linked by more than just mutual admiration and the circles the two artists moved in during those years. Perhaps more than anything else, what they share is vocal quality, and in particular a rare trait in the grain of their voices: a timbral ambivalence that lets their singing turn clear or husky without ever sounding forced or artificial. Where the British singer reveals his rougher side mainly in the more intense passages, Baglioni's voice tends, surprisingly, to work the other way round: hushed, almost crooner-like, at lower volumes and in the mid-low register, while displaying impeccable precision and clarity whenever it soars in pitch or intensity.
In the aforementioned "Domani mai", the singer reaches, with remarkable accuracy, an E5 (mi4 in Italian notation), a high note usually accessible only to sopranos and technically well beyond the range most online sources attribute to the artist (E2-A4). At the same time, tracks like "Tamburi lontani", "Signora delle ore scure" and "Qui Dio non c'è" (in 5/4, featuring a violin solo by former Magma member Didier Lockwood) show the artist perfectly at ease with deep lows too, hitting the end of phrases in tune with fine control and a velvety tone.

By the start of 1990, the melodic lines had already been fully defined, with all their swells and dips, and the arrangements needed just a few finishing touches. Yet when it came to the lyrics, the author was still all at sea. Worse still: he had all but finished them, only to throw them away. Not once, but twice. For nearly a year, production work stalled while the author searched for a satisfying version of the album's words, which — after the initial working title "A presto" — seemed set, in 1989, to be called "Un mondo più uomo sotto un cielo mago"; under that title it was even listed for pre-order in shops, with the promise of a limited edition.
The turning point came well into 1990, when the singer-songwriter decided to draw inspiration from a piece called "Guscio", a sort of poem he had previously written in a stream of consciousness. Starting from the words "L'immenso soffio dell'oceano", which would become the opening line of the closing track, "Pace", Baglioni reworked all twenty songs and built a concept album centred on his alter ego Cucaio (a childhood mispronunciation of his own name).
Once he had found the key, the rewriting moved swiftly ahead, resulting in a fragmented narrative that traces the protagonist's biography without following a linear order, instead coiling back on itself in keeping with memory's spiralling motion. Thus "Naso di falco" revives the curiosity and sense of wonder of childhood while crossing it with thoroughly contemporary questions ("Chi ha ingannato il cielo ad Ustica?", "Chi ha insozzato il vento a Chernobyl?"), while "Acqua dalla luna" weaves together the impossible ambition of rescuing every fragile soul with the youthful wish "... essere un grande mago/ Incantare le ragazze ed i serpenti".

Tightrope walker of words

The juxtaposition of perspectives applies not only to different points in time but, as in the passage just quoted, to the syntax of the verses too. In several places on the album, Baglioni resorts to a very specific form of zeugma, in which a single predicate correctly governs two different objects that carry different meanings. Further examples can be found in the very first track, "Dagli il via" ("Bruciai una macchina e il mio passato" — first concrete, then abstract) and in the hushed duet with Mia Martini on "Stelle di stelle" ("Spinse tutto il fiato in gola / E una lunga ruvida parola").

Extremely attentive to linguistic construction, Baglioni strings together figurative images ("Io dal mare": "Larghe nuvole di muffa e olio/ Appaiate come acciughe"), plays with verbal puns ("Noi no": "Comete come te"), and moves with ease both through assonances and internal rhymes ("Io dal mare": "E innanzi al mare ad ansimare sto/ Perché domare il mare non si può"; "Le donne sono": "Insolite insolute insalate"; "Io, lui e la cana femmina": "Quando la notte è passata al passivo/ Alle sette passate oltrepasso la porta / E sorpasso il passetto di passiflora [and so on!]") and through distant ones as well — this is the chorus of "Tamburi lontani", and one suspects the correspondence with the title is no coincidence:

And how everything comes back
And how everything passes
Things change in order to live
And they live in order to change
The sea rises and falls
And never a single drop is lost…

And every day we're
Behind a counter
Giving change and then smiling
A breathless dance
If the band goes by
And until you stop chasing

Among the boldest tracks for the songwriter is certainly also "Vivi", perhaps the one where his desire to shake off the reputation of a sentimental crooner is most evident. Far removed from any postcard-style sentimentality, this opening track of side two grafts an eroticism as sharp as it is oblique onto one of the album's most rock-driven arrangements:

What more do you want than to go Filling our lungs with all the air of an evening Like kites walking through other people's streets Seeking a new fear and the dark of doorways Pulling up your skirt, doing it standing, savoring Our harsh affinity What more do you want, we were Without clothes, without time, without anything else under Your coat, and with our legs we caressed each other And a bruised sky, and God let it pour down And inside our eyes alarms, cursing each other I love you American reflections

Oltre

With the final recordings completed between Rimini and London (for the vocal parts and last orchestral additions), the album was finally released on 17 November 1990.
The artwork, overseen by photographer Guido Harari — with the singer-songwriter's silhouette portrayed as a tightrope walker, forming the "T" of the title — provides an evocative symbolic frame for this ambitious double album. Blending figurative elements with abstract fields of colour, the cover and booklet tie the album's journey to the four elements — explicitly mentioned in the lyrics of "Vivi" itself and, in some cases, easily matched to individual tracks. The limited edition promised the previous year also included the full text of "Guscio", now available online.

Commercially, "Oltre" spent 58 weeks in the Tv Sorrisi e Canzoni top 50, three of them at number one: around 900,000 copies were sold in Italy. That figure marks a clear drop from the million and a half copies sold by "La vita è adesso" (which spent 27 consecutive weeks at the top!), though the comparison is unfair: being a double album, "Oltre" was sold at roughly one and a half times the price of its predecessor. Nine hundred thousand copies were nonetheless a hard target to hit for the Italian record market of the time. Rounding out the picture was the success of "Mille giorni di te e di me", whose music dated back to the days of "La vita è adesso". The complete 1990 rewrite of its lyrics gave it the story of the singer's just-ended relationship with manager Rossella Barattolo, but the song's blend of epic scope and everyday feeling soon transcended biographical anecdote to become an anthem for the legacy left behind by every ended love story. That gap between the particular and the universal accounts for the evergreen quality that still defines the song today, among the most performed and played in the entire repertoire of the Roman artist.

Critical reception was nothing short of enthusiastic: the album's release was perceived as an event, and the project was soon hailed as the songwriter's long-awaited masterpiece. In Repubblica, Gino Castaldo admitted that "we'll have to start taking Mr. Claudio Baglioni seriously", while "Tv sorrisi e canzoni" published a double review signed by Enzo Biagi and Ennio Morricone: for the latter, the distance of Baglioni's latest effort from the worn-out conventions of Italian song ("The traditional A-A1-B-A form, […] the repetitive I-vi-ii-V harmonic formula") was proof of his nature as a "composer never enslaved" to convention. Free, indeed. Free to settle his accounts with fame, to stop chasing himself, and to launch into a new tour, experimenting for the first time with placing the stage at the centre of the venue. And then, if the pun may be forgiven, to start looking beyond. With the subsequent "Io sono qui" (1996) — again made alongside Pasquale Minieri — and "Viaggiatore sulla coda del tempo" (1999), the singer-songwriter completed a "trilogy of time" of which the 1991 album represents the first chapter, dedicated to the past. Both later records would pick up and develop some of the countless musical ideas conceived — and never used — during the sessions for "Oltre", further expanding the artist's musical vocabulary. Definitive proof that the freedom from constraints which had left him in checkmate back in 1988, Baglioni had finally learned not merely to endure — but to inhabit.

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13/09/2026