Fabrizio De André
Canzoni

"Songs" or "Volume 7"?

Let's start from the beginning. The good Fabrizio De André was coming from that "Storia di un Impiegato" which was much debated at the time but is now considered a milestone, or almost. Somehow, our man managed to churn out masterpieces practically annually, and in fact, "Tutti Morimmo a Stento," "La Buona Novella," and "Non al Denaro Non all'amore Né al Cielo" alone had already projected him among the greats of Italian music forever, to the point that he could have even decided to end his career there and we would still be worshipping him today like a god come to earth.

To give some political-temporal coordinates, we are in the first half of the Seventies, in Italy the climate, not the weather eh, is more than hot, it's scorching, and at the demonstrations, sometimes someone turns up with a gun. "Storia di un Impiegato," in the extra-parliamentary left-wing circles, was torn apart, judged a failed attempt to give himself the tone of an engaged intellectual. De André, just for a change, is again in crisis and has not the slightest idea what to write, but contracts and various disputes certainly do not wait for the inspiration of the moment.

So what? With humility, he openly admits his own limits: I don't know what to do, it's better to re-propose old stuff. Today, for such operations, we would calmly speak of "scraping the bottom of the barrel" and, after all, the thing is not too far from reality but it should also be emphasized that De André was certainly not a novice and, even in these cases, he still manages to produce a valuable work, also thanks to some good tricks. The good Fabrizio was full of ideas but also had the ability to understand who, in certain contexts, was better than him or could nonetheless become an excellent "tool" for achieving his goals, which is why his career was so full of prestigious collaborations: once he was defined as a great organizer of others' work. And right in those months, there's a young Roman singer-songwriter, one Francesco De Gregori, who is slowly coming out with interesting things, so interesting that De André wants to work with him. From there, one of the most atypical collaborations in the history of Italian music would start, not so much for any divergences between the two, but for the "method" of working: Faber simply doesn't want to stay up during the day like every other Christian, so what does he do? At night, when he's cheerful and lively, he writes a lot and leaves various notes to De Gregori, who then the next morning, when he's in "work mode," takes them up. The result of this constant "changing of the guard" would be "Volume 8" of the following year, but that's another story.

"Songs," never was a title more fitting for a collection of such heterogeneous and "scattered" material, is nonetheless the testing ground for understanding the harmony with De Gregori, which here materializes in "Via della Povertà," the "translation" of Bob Dylan's "Desolation Row." The ten-minute length, especially for a track placed at the beginning of the album, is perhaps excessive but the experiment succeeds, with Dylan tastefully deandrized, and the track fits perfectly, in terms of musicality and themes, into the discography of the Genoese singer-songwriter. "Songs," given that, as you might have guessed, there was a shortage of new material, is therefore the occasion to pay tribute to old and new influences. If Dylan and De Gregori effectively open the doors to folk rock or at least to a musically Anglo-Saxon approach, which would then reach its peak in the years of collaboration with Massimo Bubola, other reinterpretations, today we would simply talk of covers, recall those who until then had been the mentors of the Genoese. Georges Brassens comes into play with "Le Passanti," one of the most fascinating pieces interpreted by the Ligurian singer-songwriter, and "Morire per delle Idee" which in fact, along with the piece reworked with De Gregori, represent the only real novelties on the album.

Given that there is still half an hour of vinyl to fill, he proposes again that operation already put in place several years earlier, around the time of "Volume 3," which this "Songs" could indeed be considered the worthy sequel to. Well before the various concept albums, in fact, Fabrizio De André had distinguished himself for a long series of 45s released during the Sixties, with several tracks that had been, specifically reworked, rescued for the various "Volume 1" and "Volume 3." An album-filler like this nevertheless deserves credit, in fact, for finally making it to an official LP with tracks like the ironic "La Città Vecchia" and "La Canzone dell'amore Perduto," authentic gems which, inexplicably, until then had not enjoyed wider distribution. If "Fila la Lana" combined that fascination of De André with medieval atmospheres with those anti-militarist themes that had already made him famous, "Suzanne" and "Giovanna d'Arco," originally side A and B of the same 45, are a tribute to the world of Leonard Cohen.

"Songs," as abundantly explained, was born in a period of crisis and from the need to still release new material: the premises for a fiasco, in fact, were all there, but thanks to good ideas, like the collaboration with De Gregori, which would soon be deepened, and the recovery of already dated material, they still managed to offer the great public an album worthy of the name on the cover. Despite this, it is undoubted that the great albums of the Genoese artist remain others and that listening to an album of this kind is advisable only to those who already have a good knowledge of De André's repertoire and would like to discover also some of his less known songs.

1. Via della Povertà
2. Le Passanti
3. Fila la Lana
4. La Ballata dell'amore Cieco (o della Vanità)
5. Suzanne
6. Morire per delle Idee
7. La Canzone dell'amore Perduto
8. La Città Vecchia
9. Giovanna d'Arco
10. Delitto di Paese
11. Valzer per un Amore (o Campestre)