I had some old scores to settle. Personal questions, since unlike my latest albums, this one is not a mythological, imaginary record, nor is it an album on history, science and geography... There is no coup de cannon like in “Bardamu”… but the rules of engagement to kill on the Euphrates instead. There is no legendary America of the West, but today’s, desolate America, where I also had some scores to settle. There are questions of personality. Focusing how much we've been unable to be sincere, how much we've always hidden behind the shadows and how we've groped our way through them looking for the other, more out of a mute desire rather than awareness. The other which exists as a tension or as separation and which, by amplification, enlarges our own shadows. Yet this is not a melancholic record. There is no whining. Tears – where present – are dry and have become mortar in time, so that something can be built on them. There is a vision based on awareness and sometimes even epic.
And then several personal themes, like being underground, for instance. This tendency to hide one's one nature and to escape in order to Be, to start to face that path. And still the fire of youth is there, still close enough to feel its heat. There is love, the loving one, which orphans once it is lost, and the naked road from the look and we can only turn to the “Paradiso dei Calzini” (Sock Heaven) in order to have some chance of finding it again.
Or you can hope to meet “Il Gigante e il Mago" (The Giant and the Wizard), a sort of miracle that may only happen once you are "alone" indeed, and all at once and in one room we became adults... The creatures you have had inside of you since you were little, and which the road sometimes gives you if you are ready for the charm. Creatures walking in the dark, trying to keep the flame of their innocence and humanity alight inside of them, among inhuman apparitions.
And there is also scope for paying homage to the invincible high spirits, tobacconist’s shirts with breast pockets, Vincenzo Cinaski’s whistle, the stroll in the neighbourhood on a sunny day found by oneself, so as not to have to thank anyone but the sun itself… Whistling to the girls and yet remaining seated at the table, not following anything, neither trapdoors nor funnel… Growing up taking all the little things, all the dreaming and all the saveable with oneself.
Fancying is all of this. On the other hand, death, like in war, has nothing epic. It is like an explosion when you don't expect it, and pieces of flesh and butchery. Nothing else. And violence is such harshness, and it is impersonal because it is mediated by some instrument – a remote control, a radar, a precision telescope. This is the song called “Lettere di Soldati” (Soldiers’ letters) – the end of any epic. The only non-mechanical thing is that moment which is bigger than lives, when life stretches out to a thought and tries to reach for your loved ones and the universe that is nothing to you, without you. It is also the moment when love letters are written. The only fairly big thing in a word that still forces to be so mean to keep on killing one another, small and armed.
And America waving its surrender in silence, the big bodiless silence of America. The new nation that had set as a guide for the world is a big warehouse, a big mall that turns everything - first and foremost the lives of its own citizens - into goods, into large-scale retail. In the apparent ferment of information lies its irremediable silence. Flags are always waving in America, often in silence. There is one in every corner. Flags which seem to be too loud as they wave on the funerals of the bodies returned from Iraq, on the perfectly mown green fields in cemeteries. They wave in the silence broken by the fanfare of the Salvation Army-like band.
Musically the record is constructed almost in a philological way. The piano and the vocals are alone, at the centre. Around them, serving sometimes as a choir, sometimes as shadows, tinkle, environment, air and coat, are a series of instruments. Sometimes intangible ones (glasses, theremin, saw, toy piano, strings' reverberation), sometimes dreamlike ones (Mighty Wurlitzer, optigan, mellotron), sometimes choral ones (the Salvation Army-like reeds, brass). The wind section placing itself around the piano together with the bass drum nods and agrees.
The finishing touch to this work, once the album was finished and mixed, was a trip to the West of America and the reading of Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and of all that biblical and rural America. The America of little villages and hidden drives, a sort of Spoon River of the living, got me to write one more track while I moved from motel to motel as I travelled towards the West. I called it “La Faccia della Terra” (The Face of the Earth) because only when you are “alone” we say in Italian “alone on the face of the Earth”. Once I got to Tucson, the song was recorded in its early stage, together with Calexico and their chequered shirts. The sound and the literary register of this track differ from the others. There is rust, guitar and dust, and lyrics about loneliness and relationships among people with biblical names… About all these men and women continuing to weave ribs among them and to be blind, crippled and alone… It does sound different indeed, for a record that for the first time in my career is organic and almost circular. But it's like the whale’s puff - it's out there, in the air, but it comes from the whale. So we took it on board, shaggy and dusty as it is.
My collaborators were chosen in a natural way. For the first time, full responsibility was taken for the production. In order to be better prepared for adverse events, we decided to name "La Cupa" the production company which legally delivered this work. The leader of such mission was Luca Bernini, who had all the recklessness and the boldness of those who don’t know the ropes, which however are necessary to do things at best (from journalism dealing with reviewing things already happened, to the event that provokes such reviews). He let himself guide only by passion and love for this record. It's a collaboration which can be seized after years of ripening - just like the tastiest fruits.
Without moving too far, a musical co-producer was found, full of taste and passion. Alessandro "Asso" Stefana, in the bloom of youth, knows instruments, has ideas on how to use them and is in love with the recording studio. He could spend the best quantity of his life inside of it (I do not belong to that club - after some hours on the studio I get overwhelmed by the infinity of possibilities). The great Taketo Gohara is also a member of that club of amphibians of the recording studio. The ultimate sound engineer, he treats emotions with the care of a sashimi cutter, without losing anything of the aroma. Overseas he is a true fan of the recording studio. He event built one in his likeness, the Brooklyn Recording, inside of which he moves like a crab on a wheelchair, following the cursors with his chubby, loving fingers, like a litter at its first run. His name is Andy Taub and he's JD Foster's trustworthy sound engineer. I’ve known JD for producing the beautiful records by Marc Ribot's Cubanos Postizos, who always talked to me about him with huge esteem. He's the best and he's not so busy and booked like the others. Besides, he's special. Reassuring, full of passion, and in his sound are American vastness, roads and empty hotel rooms.
Again, not far from there an extraordinary, young, unquiet and disquieting arranger was to be found. We started working on Halloween's night, and since he's a Tim Burton film character himself, he immediately prepared an empty pumpkin with a candle inside and toothpicks instead of teeth. For days we happened to see how old a pumpkin face gets... The face sinks on the teeth and the pumpkin, worthy of a coach, turns into a witch. Enrico "Keith" Gabrielli could be the coachman of that pumpkin, and as one he wrote tailor-made string and wind arrangements, which can highlight and overshadow words that support emotion where it would naturally fade.
There are instruments which deserve a story. The Tallone piano is a case in point, recorded in the house of his builder courtesy of my nephew in-law, Jean Philippe Caron. It's a piano with such a beautiful story that we thought of recording the whole album with it. For literary reasons we limited its use to "Il Paradiso dei Calzini" (Sock Heaven).
Yet we used different kinds of piano, although my favourite is not present (my old 1928 Duysen, very similar to the Bechstein of that age). "Una Giornata Perfetta" (A Perfect Day), for example, employs a beautiful Baldwin Caroline square piano, perfect for the saloon or the straight piano of old (as I looked out of the window and the sky, I said: «Now you have to put all the good humour of this blue sky and all Thelonious Monk's little tricks»), and then a 1905 Steinway model where you could hear all the old railways and hobos of America, all Scott Fitzegerald, for "Dall'Altra Parte della Sera" (On the Other Side of the Night), and then the beautiful Steinweg Gran Coda of the Officine Meccaniche Studios, recently restored, with its epic and round sound.
There are also self-built instruments like Gianfranco Grisi's glassharmonica, provoking immediate drowsiness and hypnosis, and some special appearances: Mario Brunello, the stabbing cello in "Lettere di Soldati" (Soldiers' Letters); the champion of absence Pascal Comelade, who sent the recording of his legendary toy instruments for "Il Paradiso dei Calzini" (Sock Heaven) directly from the Pyrenees; Frank London, the disguised trumpetist who together with Matt Diarriau (both from the Klezmatics) served as a little Salvation Orchestra.
All the tracks I've written are mine except for the last one, "Non C'È Disaccordo Nel Cielo" (There Is No Disagreement in the Sky), titled after an old hymn composed by Frederick Martin Lehman in 1914. He was a specialist in the genre – he wrote many hymns, often harmonized by his daughter. Apparently he wrote this song while he was in dire straits. Maybe that's why he looked up to the sky and thought, at least there are no disappointment and songs in E minor there... I listened to the song in the beautiful version by Jimmy Scott, taken from the album Heaven. The lyrics are not a translation of the original, but rather my own personal way of feeling the topic. A sky within easy reach of everyone's prayers, which maybe will admit us and maybe will be found empty. But that is definitely where all the tears we had when we were better will go.
Vinicio Capossela, october 2008