Fabrizio De André
Fabrizio De André (L'indiano)

Fabrizio De André - L'Indiano (1981)

While continuous sighs caress my ears, I wonder what mood Fabrizio De André's eyes might have conveyed to those fortunate interlocutors at the dawn of the '70s, crossing into the '80s, or fully settled in the last decade of the 1900s. Probably moods as distant from each other as the difference between winter and spring light. Blindly fishing in Faber's discography means stumbling upon works that seem like inconceivable manifestos of a man boiling with passion and creative abilities beyond the ordinary. An ear in perpetual listening, eyes desperate with tears and a hand ready to narrate the world, lips becoming a medium, from a privileged point of view, seated on another sphere.

Continuing the discourse started with "Rimini" and with Massimo Bubola always at his side, as a trusted co-author of the lyrics (and sometimes even something more) and skilled chiseler of sounds once again influenced by American folk-rock tradition, Faber dives once more into his way of speaking to the people he loves so much. The concept album, a true flagship of the Genoese singer-songwriter's discography. Certainly far from the timeless "Buona Novella" and its endless and equally "good" verbosity, "L'Indiano" is once again a work based on a main theme, depicted in the comparison of the living conditions of the Sardinian people and the atrocities suffered by the Native Americans. (hence the splendid cover art, "La Sentinella," by Frederic Remington).

The kidnapping inevitably brutally marked the drafting of the album, as well as the emotional themes dragged between the lines or spit out in all frankness. Faber, with the impetus of a boundless mind, used the event itself to lovingly narrate the land that "confined" him for a few months, to dress it in passion and exonerate it. This is what the chosen theme tells us and the profound harmony that Fabrizio seems to have acquired in the grooves of this work (and to think he found himself, years earlier, a step away from saying goodbye. The tour with PFM was enlightening and decisive in this sense).

The presence of Bubola and his orientation more inclined towards "rock", as I was saying, is evident from the introductory track, "Quello Che Non Ho," with its powerful charge and forceful march, accompanied by an intro of gunfire and game chase, in some desperate Indian prairie, where it's told how the arrival of the white man denatured the perfect cohesion with nature and life that the Native Americans had embraced, so distant from material goods, which we can well do without. "Quello che non ho, è questa prateria, per correre più forte, della malinconia...", sings Fabrizio with the mournful voice of someone who knows they have lost the most precious asset, to the detriment of enforced progress. Percussions at the forefront, a driving bass, and a splendid symphonic outro make for a knife-edge start. It's the confiscation of the prairie. Native Americans are annihilated like a mild spring night. For a track dedicated to the "redskins," the comparison shifts to the Sardinian people, dear to him, with the delicate "Canto Del Servo Pastore", a poignant ballad opening up to the dilemmas of existence, now so peacefully clear in their essence and importance, in the mouth of the Sardinian shepherd servant who tells of how the wildest and most direct life in contact with the things of nature has left him unaware even of his origins. "Qual'è il mio vero nome, ancora non lo so". Nature that in every cycle, however, carries a fragment of his life, "Sopra ogni cesto da qui al mare, c'è un po' dei mie capelli". Along with the conscious and coherent rejection of the advent of technological society, there's also a poignant reflection on missed loves, "L'amore delle case, l'amore bianco vestito, io non l'ho mai saputo e non l'ho mai tradito". All of this rests on delicate piano notes, gentle arpeggios, distant flutes, and Fabrizio's voice, rarely so illuminated. "Fiume Sand Creek", narrates a shameful massacre, alas, actually perpetrated against the redskins. The intro, so slim yet grand, echoes moments past, in the green prairies that served as the theater for the bloody and unequal fight. The song is a blooming of distressing images, with a terribly sweet aftertaste. Just think of the figure of the grandfather reassuring the terrified grandchild by telling him a sea of lies. "Ora i bambini dormono, nel letto del Sand Creek". Instrumentally, again, an intertwining of acoustic guitars, various percussions, choirs, and Fabrizio's inimitable warm and languid tone carry the song, which would become a battle horse in concerts. The love for that unspoiled land, Sardinia, emerges from De André in all its glory, in the intriguing and atypical, "Ave Maria". It is a Sardinian folk song, splendidly readapted and raised to the heavens by the splendid voice of Mark Harris. The intro, reminiscent a bit of the "Pink Floyd" of "Animals", takes us to the first observant prayer, "Deus, Deus ti salve Maria". It's one of the few songs where Fabrizio's voice isn't heard (except in the choirs). Yet it's one of the most intense. A demonstration of how he was also a great "orchestra conductor" and an experimenter.

The song that best reflects the post-abduction De André is perhaps "Hotel Supramonte". The place that hosted Fabrizio and Dori is here reinvented with a sweet nickname, a sign of how those months spent tied and blindfolded next to his partner must have awakened a new man. It's a poignant, delicate ballad, voice, and guitar, to which a sobbing violin is added, retracing the salient phases of those days, with Fabrizio surrounded by nature, sighs, rain, and Dori, whom he tenderly invokes over and over in the song. As he had the opportunity to affirm, without her by his side, he probably wouldn't have been able to endure all that. In the terrible experience, Fabrizio himself came to "recommend" or hope for a similar vicissitude for everyone, which like nothing else, brings you back to the essential needs and seemingly minute things of life, to small pleasures, to "trivial" achievements. It is also evident the forgiveness, useful to reiterate, that hangs from the lips of this song, for the kidnappers. After a quartet of raw intensity, it returns to seemingly lighter atmospheres with "Franziska", which tells the story of a rogue's woman forced to live alone and in her meager memory, as the loved one is forced to go into hiding. A funny yet raw nursery rhyme, again laid on a playful rhythm and Fabrizio's voice. Speaking of the dream of freedom as a woman cut into pieces and reassembled with hope from the elements of the cosmos is a certain kind of "sacred" flour that only characters like De André could churn out. "Se Ti Tagliassero A Pezzetti" is, in the writer's opinion, perhaps the best track of the album, a true vintage love story between Fabrizio and freedom, told with springlike, almost bucolic images, with a melancholic guitar line that in every verse rises behind the singing, almost announcing that "cloud of doubts". And after the inevitable call to the wings of freedom, inevitable when talking about redskins, it closes with the playful description of the life that will be, in "Verdi Pascoli". As the title suggests, with a hypnotic rhythm and opened by an unexpected but brief drum solo, Fabrizio lets himself be carried away in a description of the Native Americans' Paradise, which perhaps marks the end of the "sufferings" "... presto la notte se ne andrà, con le sue perle stelle e strisce in fondo al cielo." The suffering of the redskins ends, but perhaps the listener's begins, wishing for the last notes to rejoin instantly those hunting choirs, to plunge back into this bittersweet fresco of human ferocity and ancient call of nature.

Denouncing the excessive commercial commodification of De André that occurred according to some in this album, wrapped in seemingly less refined and imaginative lexical plots and devilishly well-curated arrangements far from chansonnier style, means depriving oneself of a very inspired fragile friend. And it would be a shame that no dawn would ever wash away, for a work without weak points, fresh and very current.