Calcutta
Forse...

It happens, sometimes. That stroke of luck that catapults you to the top floors, a coincidence of events that opens you from the provincial fog to the splendid yet deceptive lights of the city. It happens that you’re a clumsy singer-songwriter and hit the mark with a killer pop tune, on which the trendiest director of the moment designs a masterpiece of a music video. It happens that your music reaches a huge audience just when Italian alt-rock, different but by now so self-referential it sounds classic, starts to show its age. All this happens, sometimes. Just a few times, perhaps. Never, though, is all this the result of chance. A song like "Cosa Mi Manchi A Fare", the greatest ballad of precarious love of our times, you don’t write by accident.

Edoardo D’erme, born in 1989, has paid his dues. A child of the Roman underground scene (he was born in Latina), he begins to compose around the age of twenty, plays in ramshackle and proudly unknown noise bands before founding I Calcutta with a partner as unlucky as him. The partner will leave - artistic or personal differences? - Edoardo will remain alone. Calcutta. With his guitar. And his very personal vision of pop music, free to run through fields of deviant poetry, metropolitan, certainly, at times claustrophobic, but undeniably tending toward cathartic asceticism. “L’estate a Sabaudia”, swimming “without a towel”, memories to take refuge in, baths of melancholy to immerse yourself in and emerge from cleansed. “We’ll meet in Venice / we’ll get married in Pomezia” - that chronic province is a state of mind - “I’ll take you to Hawaii” - it’s not true, but I swear it is - and “we’ll get married in a canoe” - we’ll migrate offshore from this mirror of murky water that’s more a pond than a lake. “Only if you row with me”. Will you be by my side?

No, “another summer has just passed without you” and still “another winter”. “And I think / always / damn you”. Your traces are at the bottom of every glass, in the ashes of every cigarette, in the bruised purple of the heart after each bruise. “At gym class, I met you”, when “a dark cellar where we” didn’t fit, and we could only consummate our love in the worst four-wheeled wrecks. With the shitty smell of the Arbre Magique capturing everything in an acrid feeling. Isabella, Amarena, Lucia, Irina, Enrico (my friend), Stella. And Nicole, I’m hungry! You talk to me about health and then you add bacon. Nicole, for God’s sake. But I love you, and I love all of you. “We’ll never give up / because we are dinosaurs”. Let me believe it.

Guitars in the distance for ecstatic memories. Out of tune, of course. Electroblooms, scraps of existentialism in a lo-fi filter. Aching veins, on arms tired of lifting the weight of life, but that do not cease to aim elsewhere. A superb melodic instinct, it must be said (Proof? "Pomezia", "Cane", "Amarena" - just to name three). True poetry, it must be admitted, with a sweet phonetic taste: “the walks you never took / like the songs you will not listen to / the ten serenades under the window you do not have” ("Enrico"); “what beautiful eyes you have / what courage you don’t have to say that then / at nine you go / away” ("Vieni Sola").

But in the end, what do I have left? In the end, I’m alone in the darkness of this room. The dog is gone, but I’m home, while you always come alone. And friends don’t warm a heart that can’t afford the heating bill. I will go out one day. I will meet you again, taste you in the flavor of ice cream and olives. I will invent you as I like, as you don’t need to be missed. You already are, in my every gesture. If you ever listen to it, know that I have already immortalized you in a crappy record.