Claudio Lolli
Canzoni Di Rabbia

"And from a tunnel exit, with your heart in your throat, you find the sun in your face searching through your thoughts: It reads inside you the nostalgia, the cool darkness where until yesterday you threw away your days of eternity. But the desire to live may save you, at the exit of a tunnel."

To describe these songs, one needs to have a bit of a poet inside.

One must leave the strings of their own melancholy loosened, and catch one by one the frequencies of Lolli’s warm and naive voice. This was his third work after "Aspettando godot" and "Ho visto anche degli zingari felici", and also one of his less credited ones.

"Canzoni di rabbia" is born bored and dies furious. It’s an album that, as has often happened to Lolli’s disadvantage, has the flaw of appearing politicized. But instead, it carries the little sympathy that this singer-songwriter has always received for better or worse thanks to his openly declaring himself a communist.

And this is precisely one of the characteristics I like most about Claudio Lolli: the sincerity of letting his political faith shine through his music. And music can only be one of the many mirrors of the soul. He knew: you cannot express your views without taking a stance, and his came only from a way of being.

This certainly distinguished him; he never betrayed himself. But it is so easy for us to dispense with listening to his albums, foregoing the poetry in favor of political prejudices. I want to remember, poetry is above communism and political art. His is once again a journey into his intimacy and the human side of his characters. It begins precisely with the "journey" with the first track, at the exit of a tunnel. A song with which he superbly expresses nostalgia and worries, and the desire to leave a place to then reflect on his past and what he is moving away from. It starts with major chords that are not always common in his compositions; this is indeed a song that can even appear hopeful when he sings "a desire to live, perhaps will save you". Everything instead seems to move away with the road being traveled, and the desire to live is already nostalgia.

It continues with "Prima comunione", a raw and stripped-down description of what was nothing but a bad day, of a fear that does not peel off even after removing the "stiff shirt", and the remorse of not having laughed already then at the "bigoted and damned" priests. In "20 anni", it's again about memories. Sadness becomes more peer-like, and even though the wounds have had time to heal, there are moments that become almost as vivid as they once were. They define what has made no sense and will never make sense. They define the "Viaggio di ritorno", among the "soft and fast" fog that hides Turin.

Something can overcome the despair. The laughter that gets lost when inside you want to hold it back, when you know you cannot force your face to mask the incredible sadness, of the journey back, that between the fog and city noises await the rivers.

The next track, "Donna di fiume", has the most positive notes of the album along with the final verses of "compagni a venire". Here Lolli knows he is recounting one of the experiences worth living for, the night in a rented room with a river woman. The river woman denied to the blessed, who drags you with her currents and takes you deep into the depths of love, after an endless embrace. The sound tones become mocking and almost jaunty when talking about the "Milite ignoto". A song that has its own, anything but trivial, even though the references to those before him who sang about this figure are numerous. Thus, crudeness makes its way through questions and hypotheses, for which death comes fighting a brother for a piece of land that doesn’t even belong to the man.

The track "Dalle capre" arrives, the story of a jailer and probably the first song to address this theme. The story of a shepherd who comes from the goats to guard "a buddy for a bit of wine and bread", who now sees himself as a slave to his trade, which, no matter what happens, ironically, even abandoning it all and becoming a thief, he’d find himself in the same jail that barely keeps him alive, depriving him of almost every freedom. A song among Lolli's saddest and without an exit, which tells us of the absurdity of this society.

The album is nearing its peak, and reaches moments of lyricism and naturalness worthy of the best singer-songwriters of all time as "Compagni a venire" begins. And this is a song that reveals the album's title that contains it, perhaps never more furious and determined. It vents its resentment with rhetoric first in a passive way, then almost yelling quietly, already from the start accusing their parents: "Could I ever forgive your tired love the secret pleasure of a far-off night, which threw me into an a-vaginal world without even asking if I preferred to be born or the glorious death of an illegal abortion". It continues by questioning whether it could forgive its friends and few women, and "the God that does not exist" and finally itself and its anger, so strong it could sink a ship and drown the sailors among the stormy sea waves.

"Canzoni di Rabbia" ends with the gesture of affection from his companions, scattered in this world "not to the size of a man nor of a woman nor even of a child".

It ends with thank-yous, in this life that must have an end.