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Rating: Blue Thoughts.
There are days you know are magical. You know it beforehand. They contain such a tangle of expectations that they can only turn out perfect.
I waited a long time before I put emotions on paper, on purpose.
My way of feeling things, very primitive and intuitive, is formed by two stages of emotions.
What I call skin emotions, which are all those I perceive the moment something happens to me, and what I call gut emotions, which are those that remain with time. In general, everything I write tells of my skin emotions. It’s indeed very difficult for me to prevent myself from capturing all that series of details and nuances I manage to perceive when something beautiful happens to me. I adore those details and nourish myself with them. I describe them precisely because I know that if I don't, over time those sensations would vanish, making way for others, deeper, more calculated, evaluated. A sort of syrup of myself that with time refines everything I live and idealizes or reconstructs or simply relives some moments.
I purposely waited to write about the night of Pistoia Blues because I didn’t want to recount it caught up in the euphoria of the moment, but I wanted time to calmly reprocess that night. I needed everything to settle inside me so that I could then seek and retrieve what happened and relive it not once but many times and refine it to fully grasp the essence of those hours.
This summer many times I closed my eyes and returned to that evening, at least every time I put on that green python top, and every time with headphones I found myself alone listening again to that guitar and dreaming of being still in the middle of those people, with those very hot stones under my feet, with the disappointment of having run out of batteries in the camera but with the absolute awareness of listening to his hands play.
Just a few steps from me.
I closed my eyes to see again the blue of that sky in contrast with the monuments of the square that color the contours of my eyes with sand. I felt again the chats with the people around me, who came from many parts of Italy to Pistoia. And then the light that diminishes to give way to the evening. The air that remains warm and the smell of beer and smoke. And then when the concert starts the absolute magic of his wonderful voice and his guitar.
I can't remember the setlist and it doesn't matter much. I know that that night Ben was there with his heart and the whole audience noticed it. We were hypnotized and couldn’t resist. We grew gentle with the sweeter songs and screamed with him in the more committed ones. I know that when "Glory & Consequence" started I shouted with all the breath I had in my throat. I couldn’t believe he was singing it. Even today I can feel inside me the rush of that adrenaline. I know that when he sang "Power Of The Gospel" the guitar piece at the beginning was something very similar to paradise if there is one. And I know I cried. I know that afterwards I could hear my voice singing with his.
And this is magic.
We were no longer in a crowded square. But just me and him. And this is his magic.
I dreamed many times of hearing that voice close to me and seeing those hands brush those strings, I dreamed so many times of his words that that night it seemed impossible to finally listen to them. Hearing him sing close to me was like a hug I long missed. Like meeting the eyes of a friend you haven’t seen in a long time. Like those smiles that people who love each other exchange for no reason. It was like returning to a home I had never been to but knew.
Much of what I feel is still only at the level of perception. It is the perception of the beauty and skill of an artist who remains very humble. A person who knows how to communicate a lot to you and who has a lot to give. A person who loves and who can convey it even just through the movement of many hands moving to the rhythm of his.
That night still has much to give me. And many surprises are yet to happen. For now, I keep listening to him and dreaming of being there again.
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