Alice
Lungo La Strada Live

THE REVIEW

"One tends to divide my story into periods. But for me, who is inside it, it's different, there's continuity. I agree when someone claims that Park Hotel and Capo Nord were two breakthrough albums, but they are all stages of a journey, I have no points of arrival or restart."

                                                                                    Alice from an interview given to Sky.it, March 30, 2009

Six years after her last "Viaggio In Italia", Alice has broken her discographic silence by finally releasing the live album that was missing from her discography. Thirty years of career that had never seen a release of live material, she came close in '87 but then chose to make "Elisir"; "Lungo la strada live" features the concert held by Carla Bissi in the basilica of San Marco in Milan in 2006 alongside her trusted collaborators Steve Jansen, Alberto Tafuri, and Marco Pancaldi.

The work organically fits into the artist's production of the last decade and completes it, a search for themes common to contemporary reality such as love and faith explored in music and poetry. The theme of the inner journey is resumed and brought to completion as a necessary step in the artistic life of this talent who has suffered from the commercial and frantic mechanisms imposed by record companies. The journey begun with the release of "Capo Nord" in '80 finds its continuity as Alice maintains, it is right to see her production as a natural emanation arising at particular moments of her life, from the initial turmoil that gave way to a more intimate and hermetic soul in search of her own space in the world. The concert is not integral, twelve tracks to ensure the maintenance of an emotion without getting lost, those who have attended an Alice concert in recent years know that it is an almost mystical, spiritual experience and the natural backdrop for her art is now the silence and meditation of a church. The tracks presented all follow this common thread, the opening with "Gli ultimi fuochi", Pasolini's "Febbraio", the more cosmic and profound Battiato of "La cura", the more personal Alice with "Dammi la mano amore" and the splendid "Il contatto".

The piano dominates, the rarefied sounds of keyboards and the light rhythmic embellishments by Jansen support the intense voice of Alice, a live recording that is deeply felt and carefully detailed, which is hoped to mark the resumption of her musical journey.