February 16, 2022 3:12 pm
When I ask him why he chose to participate in the Sanremo festival in 2022, Giovanni Truppi makes me understand that he did it above all for himself, “to tell about myself as clearly as possible”. For the Neapolitan singer-songwriter, music is a personal matter. He can be seen from the approach he has to the profession, from how he is on stage, from how he talks about his songs about him in a few words, often hiding the experience behind him. If it is true that too do not communicate is communication, in Truppi’s world everything is so spontaneous and naïf as to make this assumption waver. Even the look (that tank top that, together with the employee look, has stirred many Twitter commentators) tells of an attention paid only to art. For him there are only songs.
Songs like Your father, my mother, Lucia, with whom he went to the Ariston. Songs that go against the trend, which you don’t expect to hear there. Songs that tell of a outsider as true as various historical names of the Italian alternative scene who have passed through the festival: Afterhours, Marlene Kuntz, Bluvertigo. The piece that led, in fact, has complicated harmonic progressions, a cantato that is not easy to replicate, a refrain that is not immediate, a retro but not vintage arrangement. And above all an unpopular text: it tells about adult love, the one consumed but which resists between husband and wife; that, sings Truppi, in which “one percent is love, all the rest is gritting your teeth”. Let’s look for some similar examples: it comes to my mind A hand on the eyes by Niccolò Fabi, to him For two who like us by Brunori Sas; little else in Italy.
Meanwhile, the shape. Despite being written together with Niccolò Contessa (I Cani) and Pacifico, the song has little of the round and baroque pop, dazed in content but welcoming in form, to which Truppi approached with the latest album. Poetry and civilization (2019) after dirty and anarchic records, close to jazz (The world is as you put it in your head of 2013 and Giovanni Truppi of 2015). It was not a foregone conclusion, then; in Sanremo the public has three plays at their disposal, you have to capture the attention and it is better to propose a piece that is easy to digest. “But that wasn’t my intention,” he explains. “I realize that I have written more immediate things than this, but I wanted to go with a song that really represents who I am, that is, an artist who has always composed complex songs. It was a question of consistency. The fear, standing on the stage, was not of not being understood; was to be misunderstood, to pass for the musician that I am not. And an easy piece would have facilitated this. So instead I described my world. I think it went well: there is somebody who didn’t like it, as well as many others that it doesn’t convey anything ”. The important thing, he says, is to have crossed the tour de force Sanremo unharmed, remaining themselves, because for him it was the only thing that mattered, regardless of the public.
Exactly, the public. While she talks to me on the phone, she is on her way to present in stores All the universethe album released during the festival that collects his classics and Your father, my mother, Lucia, as if it were a business card for those who discover it now. They will not be real concerts, these meetings with fans, but they are still a way to measure how much his life, the public and the very perception that the public has of him have changed, after the Ariston. “I’m decompressing,” he smiles at him. “In the week of the festival there are rhythms that I was not used to. I am meeting many new people, for the first time they also come to feel like parents with children. But it seems to me an audience similar to what there was before “. A symptom that Truppi has not altered.
Your father, my mother, Lucia has hit the mark. “I don’t think of it as a political song, any more than all the others that exist,” she says. “For me it’s a love song. But it is clear that, in 2022, adult love is an unpopular theme, because we live in a reality that always wants us to be young, snappy, on the piece. A reality fascinated by youth rather than maturity. And it is an attitude that is the child of capitalism: with this approach we are led to consume more “.
But if his song is not political in the strict sense, it does not reflect a certain civil commitment, the opposite can be said of the song he performed with Vinicio Capossela on the evening of the duets: In my hour of freedom by Fabrizio De André, from the disc Story of an employee (1973); an anarchist ballad about the stay in prison of the protagonist of the concept album, an employee who, having come into contact with the sixty-eight Frenchman, becomes an individualistic rebel and then, in jail, discovers the importance of collective struggle, aware that “there are no good powers”. The two added a significant appendix to the original: after having sung the Genoese singer-songwriter’s “as far as you believe yourselves acquitted, you are forever involved”, they added a “as far as we believe ourselves acquitted, we are forever involved”. “We wanted to distance ourselves from De André”, explains Truppi. “I could not put myself on his ‘judgmental’ level: I am the mass, I too am involved in a certain indifference. It was an act of honesty ”.
All the universe is a collection born “because a record of unreleased was not yet ready and for the intuition of my record label, Universal”. The songs to put in, who selected them? “We crossed the choices between me and my collaborators. Feeling this succession is like looking behind me. I like how my approach to music, my posture, have remained the same over time: I have always tried to be found, from record to record, a little further than you would have expected to find me. Even at the cost of appearing clumsy: I made mistakes, naivety, but I understand it, I wasn’t looking for obvious choices “. So on a personal level he is satisfied.
Beyond this, however, what I notice in his pieces is the continuous search for originality that sometimes makes him extreme, in the sounds as well as in the lyrics. And if from the first point of view “at the beginning it was easier, because I had few instruments available and the songs were skeletal, so it was difficult to find similarities between me and other colleagues”, as far as the lyrics are concerned, it is surprising.
At the time of the extreme simplification of it-pop, of immediacy and of the story of everyday life, Truppi responds with love songs where he shows himself to be very fragile and contradictory (the pop ballads My e Know each other in a difficult situation), he invents theories on how the encounters between us work “governed by parts of ourselves that we know very little but that come into contact” (the dangling and jazzy Pirates), imagine surreal, edgy squares (having sex with Superman in the handcrafted rockabilly of Supermankiss his best friend in the mouth without criteria in the whispered Friends in space). Or he does social criticism (the baroque cavalcade Bourgeoisie), describes melancholy and existential voids (Sunday), improvised theories of relational psychology and existentialism (the very crooked nursery rhymes of All the universe e The world is as you put it in your head) which have nothing academic, which seem to have been born from the sofa at home, at the bar after one drink too many, but which are striking for their lucidity and originality. There are cynicism and nihilism, but also love and tenderness.
Listening to Truppi, one has the sensation of experiencing a catharsis, of being hit on the exposed nerves and finally sharing hidden thoughts, never admitted. He minimizes: “I’m just trying to vent my doubts. I do not write to exorcise demons, even if then listening to me again the effect is that. A slow, thoughtful study, in which I let the songs settle inside me before completing them. I hardly ever write straight away “.
The piece that closes All the universe is To disappear, an emotionally saturated ballad, in which “people are crystal”, we are all “just requests for help” and “two who hug very tightly make it to disappear”. It is the only one taken from his debut album There is a me inside of me (2010) and was inserted in the original version, with a saxophone as a side dish and an arrangement built entirely in house, in a more naive guise than the intense and much appreciated one, all on the piano, contained in the live Solopiano. “Listening to the original again I felt uncomfortable, especially as regards the voice. Let’s say I still had some singing lessons back then, ”she smiles. “I thought for a long time whether it should be worn or not. I also considered registering it again. But in the end it is part of me also and above all in the defects “.
And instead, as regards that text so intimate and poignant, what can be said? “There is a background of mine. A profound experience that, as almost always, I reworked in music. But what interests me most of all is the song. I prefer to protect the autobiography that generated it, not share it “. Again music, for Giovanni Truppi, is above all a private matter.