Fabrizio de André: all of his discography re-released by Sony through 2024

It is strange and difficult to present an Italian artist to an English-speaking audience. If the last records of Fabrizio De André can be appealing for those of you who are into ethnic music, as an example, a genre he practiced way before the label has been instituted, his first albums are mostly, even if not exclusively, collections of ballads for voice and acoustic guitar. For those of you that don’t understand his language, such a listening can be challenging. 

Anyway, long story short: Sony Music is re-releasing this year the entire catalogue of De André, from his very first songs collected in Vol. 1 (Sony, 2024) until his last masterpiece Anime Salve (still to be re-released). For those who know nothing about Faber – as he was called after his friend and actor Paolo Villaggio – Fabrizio De André is a singer whose work can be compared to that of U.S. songwriters such as Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, without the risk of looking ridiculous. 

De André himself translated in Italian Desolation Row and Romance in Durango – he was greeted with cheers by Dylan himself for translating the latter – to testify a deep link with the U.S. songwriting tradition. Moreover, he was inspired for his album Storia di un Impiegato (Sony, 2024) by the beat poet Gregory Corso, while for Tutti Morimmo a Stento (Sony, 2024), maybe the first concept album released in my country originally in 1970, his source of inspiration was the album Days of Future Passed (1967) by The Moody Blues. 

Tutti Morimmo a Stento, De André first proper album after a collection of singles, deals with topics like death and sorrow: drug addiction – De André himself was an alcoholic, so the song is partially autobiographical - paedophilia, war, are only some of the subjects touched by the songwriter. The album, co-credited to Gianfranco and Gian Piero Reverberi, Riccardo Mannerini and Giuseppe Bentivoglio, is the starting point for future collaborations of De André with other artists. 

If, in fact, Dylan wrote by himself all his material, Tom Waits started collaborating with his wife Cathleen Brennan after 1981 and similarly Fabrizio De André always co-created his music with other people. Someone used this habit of him to suggest De André wasn’t a proper creator, needing always other artists to rely on. But in fact, sharing creativity can be a great way not to let yourself stagnate, even because De André always greeted his co-authors openly. 

Another album you might want to listen to, in these new editions, is for certainly, between the LPs still reissued, Non al Denaro, Non all’Amore Né al Cielo (Sony, 2024), inspired by Edgard Lee Master’s Anthology of Spoon River, a book translated in Italy by Fernanda Pivano, who was also a Jack Kerouac’s friend, gifted to De André by his first wife Enrica Rignon. The singer was so hit by the collections of poems that he wanted to create an album of songs from the book. 

In this album the pivotal figure, between dwarfs who study as to become judges in order to finally get respect, chemists who refuse to die for love and die for strange experiments, musicians who will play for all their entire lives and blasphemers who refuse to get down on their knees for an invented God, is the guy with a sick heart who dies giving his love his first kiss, a symbol of courage and of the importance of love even above the preservation of life. 

Co-written with Nicola Piovani, the album is one of the most theatrical in De André’s collection. In between there are the pure collections of songs like Vol. 1, Vol. 3, Canzoni, where the singer, as the above-mentioned Tom Waits, sings of people who lives by the wrong side of the road: prostitutes, little thieves, and all this universe of people De André was going to hang out with during his formative years in Genoa, his hometown, even if he was middle class. 

Perfectly remastered – even if the previous 2002 editions were sounding great also, thanks to a 24 bit processing – and packaged in a slightly greater than the usual format if you buy CDs, while the LP have the usual dimensions, the albums are accompanied with a small booklet full of notes from De André diaries and interviews. If you love the U.S. musicians I mentioned in this article before, it would be a shame that these songs don’t touch your sensibility. 

Fabrizio de André was an anarchist also, a true one, an intellectual who all of his life tried to be independent – he gave life to a farm in Sardinia in order to write only the songs he really wanted to, instead of commercial successes – but even if far from stardom he was appreciated by most famous musicians like the pop singer Mina, who covered his song La Canzone di Marinella, dedicated to a dead prostitute. 

Possibly an anomaly in our cultural panorama, even if perfectly inserted in a small number of ‘songwriters’, Fabrizio De André later will experiment with ethnic instruments and structures, but maybe we will dedicate another article to him at the end of the year, when the planned re-releases will be fully available. For the moment I have given you advice of at least a couple of albums of him to fully enjoy.   

St. Vincent – All Born Screaming (Total Pleasure, 2024)

Every time I hear of read about an artist such as Annie Clark – but it was the same with Beck Hansen during the 1990s – defined as ‘indefinable’, ‘elusive’ or one that doesn’t take into great account well refined identities, I usually think that, even outside of the box of postmodernism, this position is a great deal. In effect, having a persona that doesn’t correspond to your real self, or having your real self hidden, is something good for an artist. 

I still remember an old, odd interview with Tom Waits in which the journalist – you can find this interview in the book Tom Waits on Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, edited by Paul Maher, Jr. (Chicago Review Press, 2011) in the chapter dedicated to the album Foreign Affairs (Asylum, 1977) – was, in his own words, unable to separate the persona from the real person, and Waits had to pass all the interview telling “I am not a drunkard”, basically. Strange and alienating. 

So, when as an example Beck gave to the world the album Sea Change (Geffen, 2002) in which he was releasing custom love songs for the first time – even if some of these songs, like Paper Tiger, were heavily quoting Serge Gainsboug’s Histoire de Melody Nelson, and so once again far from a true ‘confession’ of personal feelings, that was enough to make his creativity loose part of its glaze, as anyone can listen from Guero (Interscope, 2005) on. 

Strange as it can seem, the curse of having your own butterfly wings pin-pierced, just to use an expression Fernanda Pivano utilized to describe what Bob Dylan tried to avoid in all of his career, is something true. After all, this is something each one of us has experienced at least once in the era of the social networks. If you give all yourself to the world indiscriminately, you feel emptied, sooner or later. 

I don’t know if people is obsessed by who the ‘real’ Annie Clark is – at least as far as I’m reading through reviews in my own country - because they’re bored or because they cultivate the secret desire to see another myth burning or falling; anyway, at least listening to her last effort All Born Screaming, the risk is avoided with great majesty and artistry. 

All Born Screaming is an album of sui generis ‘pop’ songs – Clark’s technique is more that of drying her sources of inspiration, in this case industrial music as she herself expressed to the world in an Instagram post where you can find all the musicians she took inspiration from, from Throbbing Gristle to Nine Inch Nails, giving life to an expression of her own. 

Obviously, you can find such diverse influences or better said assonances with the Byrds and David Bowie (Hell is Near), NIN (Broken Man), Bjork (Big Time Nothing), but at a first listening you’ll find yourself tied into a personal expression, artistically speaking. Ah, not the mention the fact that Clark, collaborator of such diverse artists as David Byrne and Taylor Swift, this time features at least Dave Grohl on drums in the track titled Flea. 

In the end, more than an album of industrial pop, All Born Screaming is a collection of songs whose common ground is the desire to experiment and see how far you can go from your own perspective not renouncing to the pleasure of landing in different territories. And for once, who cares about who the ‘real Annie Clark’, who the ‘real personality of the artist’ is … after all, who is able to define him or herself? And so, why do we have to give artists such a thankless task?

Tom Waits: The Island Years Remastered (1983-1993)

Twelve years have passed since Tom Waits’ last effort, the album Bad As Me (Anti-, 2011), was released. Never officially retired, the singer, songwriter, musical experimentator committed in these last years more with cinema than with music, appearing in such movies as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza (2022). While rumours affirm that he is back to work on writing new music, is time for an engagement with his most daring and interesting period in my opinion, which are his 1980s and 1990s, that will be reissued in almost its entirety this fall.

During that period, after marrying his wife Cathleen Brennan, collaborator and sound designer for Francis Ford Coppola with a respectable background in contemporary music, Tom Waits, who co-opted his spouse in order to write new intriguing material, changed shape and skin definitely passing from the bluesman and the jazz crooner of the 1970s to a more interesting experimental musician, collaborating on records and in live concerts with people as avant-garde guitarist Marc Ribot, just to name one, in order to deconstruct rock music and give life to a new world populated by unlikely and absurd “American dreamers” like Frank, the main character of his triology as we will speculate in the following lines. 

This trilogy begun with the 1983 output Swordfishtrombones, first to be released by Chris Blackwell’s Island Records. If the title, and the music, made hangry Captain Beefheart who felt someone has stolen his inspiration for the album Trout Mask Replica (Straight, 1969), we can praise it as one of the most interesting albums coming out of the NY – where Tom Waits relocated from Los Angeles with his family – experimental music scene of those days.

As every post modern music, Swordfishtrombones is composed by songs where melodies and structures are apparently mongrelized while at the opposite they are deconstructed and reconstructed in order to give the listener the feeling of being put into another, but yet familiar (thanks also to Ennio Morricone and Kurt Weill inspired melodies), world, as if the music itself would be an invitation to reconsider the place we’re living in with new eyes and, above all, ears. 

The purpose is to put Frank, the lead character of the songs of the trilogy composed also by the following Rain Dogs (Island, 1984) and the double Frank’s Wild Years (Island, 1985), under the light as an American dreamer who, thanks to his passiveness – he goes looking for a new life in a new land always by train – is destined to failure and to loose himself. And if the trilogy will culminate in a theatrical play put on the scene by the famous Steppenwolf company, the following albums by Tom Waits are nontheless interesting.

Bone Machine (Island, 1992) is Tom Waits’ album most dominated by strange and dangerous to play (in Waits’ own words, see Tom Waits On Tom Waits: Interviews and Encounters, 2011, Chicago Review Press) percussions such as the self-built “conundrum” which dominates pieces like All Stripped Down and Such a Scream. The ghost of Harry Partch, an U.S. composer who built his own instruments (and the scales to play them over) dominates the album, possibly another gift from Waits’ wife Brennan who is clearly present as a co-writer through Ireland-influenced melodies like I Don’t Wanna Grow Up, a song covered subsequently by the punk band The Ramones.

And finally, last but not less interesting, The Black Rider (Island, 1993) is the album, co-written by Waits and Brennan with the Beat writer William S. Burroughs, which signs the beginning of the collaboration between the Pomona songwriter and the dramatist Robert Wilson. The story is similar to Carl Maria Von Weber’s (1786-1826) Der Freischutz and it narrates about a hunter who fall in love with a girl promised to a richer hunter. 

In order to gain her love, he will use on a competition some magic bullets given to him by the devil himself (“some of these bullets are for you and some are for me” the devil will proclamate) but one of the bullets will kill the young girl, and the hunter will get mad and lonely. Obviously influenced by the relationship Burroughs had with heroin and its being a double-face substance, The Black Rider was put on scene during the 1990s with a discreet success of public and critics, and it will be Waits’ last release with Blackwell’s label.

After almost a decade, Waits will sign with Anti-, a label created by Brett Gurewitz as a companion to Epitaph, more keen on experimental music than the latter devoted to punk rock, and his career will gain new peaks thanks to albums like Mule Variations (Anti-, 1999) and the collection of rarities Orphans (Anti-, 2006). But this is another story, and we will narrate it when new reissues will be released. 

Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs and Franks Wild Years will be issued on September 1^st, 2023, on vynil and CD, while Bone Machine and The Black Rider on October 6, 2023. 

 

 

Marc Ribot “Songs of Resistance (1942-2018)” Anti, 2018

Marc Ribot is one of the most eclectic post-modern musicians you'll ever hear on guitar. He toured exstensively with Chuck Berry and recorded guitars in many of Tom Waits' albums since 1984, but in his discography you'll also find not one, but two Cds dedicated to the music of Albert Ayler. Between the artist he worked with, there are David Sylvian, John Zorn, Elvis Costello and Mike Patton.

In 2018, Marc has become more political than ever. First with his last Ceramic Dog Trio album “YRU Still Here”, then with this new “Songs of Resistance (1942-2018)” issued by alt-rock label Anti. Politics and the resistance to fascism have a noble tradition in avant-garde jazz at least since 1970's album “Charlie Haden Liberation Music Orchestra”, where Ornette Coleman's bassist gave life to some free jazz versions of the anti-fascist and anarchist songs of the Spain of the 1920s.

Now that Trump has won the elections in the Us and the alt-right is spreading their wings all over the world, is time to embrace again the weapons of creativity against the Black Wave. And, who better than Marc Ribot? Helped by a bunch of brave singers like Tom Waits, Steve Earle, and Meshell Ndegeocello, Mr Ribot gives new life to old political songs for our harsh times.

Only the initial We are Soldiers in the Army has open references to jazz, with his textures of saxophones. The rest of the album is divided between folk songs (Bella Ciao, The Militant Ecologist), rock (The Big Fool), ethnic music (Rata de Los Patas), funk (John Brown) taking me back at the good old days in which I was listening to Ani Di Franco and Bruce Springsteen.

Obviously this is a post-modern record, in which you can touch all the time passed between the original songs and the present tense, but the original drive is still here. It's all a matter of our present tense. Fascism is coming back, and so many artists are lost in the supermarket of a sterile experimentation – now that everything has been experimented – but it's not the case of Ribot and his friends, whose idea and practice of music is still rooted in real life and their beings.