Lucio Dalla

It's 1977, and in Italy's musical and recording landscape decisive, generational changes are underway. Lucio Dalla, an extroverted and unconventional musician, finds himself at a crossroads in his career and retreats of his own accord to the Tremiti Islands and Ponza to work on a new project.

Crossing the sea and stepping away from everyday life, he fashions himself an exile far from the noise and haze of the city. Between poetry and music, between sea and shore, Dalla manages to capture, as we shall see, that crucial 1977 proscenium in all its raw social upheaval, in that fateful, restless, fatal and suspended passage.

“Sono fatti di ieri?”

The fruit of that artistic labor would be the album "Come è profondo il mare" (1977); listening to it, one can sense the artistic bond between Lucio Dalla and Roberto Roversi.

An intellectual and poet from Bologna, among the greatest of the postwar era, Roversi is a mentor anyone would wish to work with, even briefly. The two made three albums together between 1973 and '76 ("Il giorno aveva cinque teste", "Anidride solforosa", "Automobili"), genuine feathers in their cap: visionary, revolutionary, and steeped in social themes and civic commitment. Works of "turbulent human and artistic restlessness" that already reveal exactly the man Dalla was, thrown into the role with unusual passion, instinct and flair.

In those years Dalla wove and championed an original language for the singer-songwriter tradition, a critical and tenacious spirit of observation combined with a reflective, compassionate gaze on human nature.

Chronicles of wounds that never heal and burning hopes that never fade. Salvation lies in bonds of affection that remain ever possible, an added value that tempers every drama.

"Come è profondo il mare" is the first album on which Dalla, finally free, writes everything by himself. He releases and vents all that he had bottled up during his years of formation.

Starting with the title track, a true cornerstone of Italian song, Lucio is a navigator and survivor in the middle of a sea ablaze like fire. He is a modern Ulysses singing with poetic tension of the strength of love and the courage found in despair, moving through human history between memory and the irrational, startled and half-hallucinating.

A story of injustice and inequality, of killers and the oppressed, of small yet great stubborn souls who live by their own spirit and strength of will.

Return to... the sea

After the split with Roversi (essentially due to artistic censorship, though the two remained on good terms), the need to reinvent himself was imperative, and Dalla rethought his approach, going back to the source — or rather, back to the sea.

The island as an ancestral, primordial place; within its own sacred, unchanging isolation, everything and everyone finds themselves and is purified.

New perspectives emerge, a new air to breathe and see by, to oxygenate the mind. An air that in fact coincides with reality and is anything but fictitious, yet has never been fully examined: the artist captures unchanging, legitimate traits of everyday life, his own and everyone else's, as relevant today as they were thirty years ago.

He jots down and organizes every thought in a diary that would become, over time, an "icon of memory", from which he never parts. He reads and reflects on fantastical tales, on cinematic visions, and, caught between isolation and the nostalgic pull of social life, finds new impulses, a creative ferment, the urgency of an awakening of the spirit.

A sea ablaze

The lyrics penned by Dalla are the true breakthrough, the real "new music" of "Come è profondo il mare". They are accessible and open, playful and unconventional, moments of awareness rendered as streams of consciousness; they mirror a restless, complex and paradoxical world. Those lyrics are a license to "rave truthfully".

As in songs of the past, the discussion of uncomfortable social themes and disturbing subjects is both pretext and reason for this new beginning, a symbolic "point zero", a fresh start for the singer-songwriter tradition and for Italian pop, which was in the midst of shedding its skin.

The music, itself renewed and polished to a shine, amplifies the spectacle. Harmonies of shifting register, vibrant arranging inventions and unusual structures, disarming vocal performances and an overarching "open-mindedness." All helped along by an incomparable array of musicians surrounding him, sound engineers, and the RCA "family," with its endless resources and particular discipline.

Every element played a strategic role in the excellent outcome of this record.

Those who knew him recognize in Dalla that stubborn, constant and parallel determination that led him to be, at once, a pop and jazz singer, actor, poet, chronicler, tumbler, and common man. And this is the decisive difference between him and other singer-songwriters, past and present, even more than his long artistic apprenticeship.

Disperato è umano

From here comes Dalla's idea of imaginary shadowing, like Zavattini, as if he had a movie camera inside his cap. Focused glances at a stimulus, at a necessary change, at a social alarm. Making himself its spokesman, revealing and amplifying the calls of the common man.

The songs inhabiting the mirrored, multifaceted globe of "Come è profondo il mare" are stories of ordinary... normality, heightened in certain singular aspects and exalted into the paradoxical (the frenzied "Corso Buenos Aires," the notorious "Disperato erotico stomp").

The music, in those fluid, clear and luminous tones, is an allegory of salvation, bathing and striking with violent rays both poets and the destitute ("killed fifteen times at the end of an avenue").

Clear instrumental lights wrap every misery ("Treno a vela"), depression ("Quale allegria") or betrayal ("Il cucciolo Alfredo") in sweetness and flattery, in scorching chromatic balms and preliminary riffs (authentic pop hooks, of which Lucio remains a singular master).

Thought, like the raging open sea, now grows tame at the shore and turns into a soft, yielding mirage; like an apathy for the exhausted soul among drowsy boats, it cradles everything in a docile undertow ("Barcarola").

E comincia a volare

"Come è profondo il mare" was recorded entirely by Dalla at the RCA studios in Rome and then mixed in the town of Carimate, in a castle set up as a studio by artistic producer Alessandro Colombini.

As for the title track, in the form it eventually took, the judgment of Francesco De Gregori proved decisive — he was artistically close to Dalla at the time, and the two had recently shared, among other things, an enormously successful tour, "Banana Republic," perhaps the most celebrated and accomplished live album in Italian pop. Setting aside an original version of "Come è profondo il mare," more reflective, traditional and less driving, De Gregori suggested re-recording it, giving it an incisive musical rhythm ("almost like Neil Young," Dalla recalls) that would bring out its looseness. A dazzling bass scale and that sustained, perpetual groove as we know it today, over which Dalla's famous declamation climbs and surges, almost a sung rap ante-litteram.

"Treno a vela" and "Il cucciolo Alfredo" are two euphonic vessels in sequence, with their vibrant scraps of urban humanity, flowing naturally one into the other. They play on "melodic and harmonic balancing acts" of strings and Fender keyboards gently in the foreground, amid hiccups, suspensions and breaths of air.

"Quale allegria" is the most classic song Dalla wrote for this record, a true song later covered by Ornella Vanoni. Arranged with strings, it strikes and digs in with keyboards backed by siren-like female voices (as on the previous album, "Automobili"). The same goes for "Corso Buenos Aires," a pop saraband set amid a lively "live" news report; a teeming swarm of characters, instrumental pathways — Dalla's electric piano, drums and guitars — linguistic tricks, and inventions like scat (a sort of made-up language mimicking instruments, murmurs, voices).

"Disperato erotico stomp," described by its author as a response to hypocritical moralism, "a provocation both in language and in the very reasoning of the song," begins with just two chords from Dalla; it then builds with guitar, bass and a reggae influence woven into the mix, paired effectively with the song's peculiar, emblematic "in progress" narrative.

The Mediterranean melancholy that begins to spread through the album's closing stretch is heralded by “E non andar più via”: Dalla alone at the piano, dry timbres of desolation, a sense of waiting, and a tragic quality and disenchantment in lyrics still steeped in Roversi (“dove se apri le orecchie non le chiudi dalla rabbia e lo spavento”).

Finally, "Barcarola", an unshakeable, translucent stillness, almost a loss of memory and identity; like a spreading hemorrhage it stretches out a spent body, after an exhausting wait. Musically it's evoked by a distinctive pedal phasing mounted on an electric guitar, suggesting among other things the sound of a mandolin.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

20/01/2007