Fabrizio De André
Le nuvole

«...in Creuza we ended up dividing the tasks, he wrote the lyrics, I composed the music. When we started working on the new album, we realized instead that over the years our relationship had deepened, our knowledge increasingly influenced and intertwined with each other. So this time everything took shape and identity truly with a four-hand approach, chatting, inventing, doing and redoing.»

(Mauro Pagani, 2006)

[..] my Nuvole should be understood instead as those cumbersome and looming characters in our social, political, and economic life; they are all those who are terrified of the new because the new could overthrow their positions of power.»

(Fabrizio De André, 1990)

Wikipedia comes to our rescue, but it is not enough.

In the '70s, De André was heavily involved with concept albums, three in a row, each better than the last ("La buona novella", 1970; "Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo", 1971; "Storia di un impiegato", 1973), then he turned to other albums, more fragmented but still wonderful (including the excellent, in my view, "Canzoni", 1974). Six years after "Creuza de ma", the desire for a new concept album was strong, and "Le nuvole" was supposed to be it, a concept album about the decadent society of the late 19th century. It became something else, uniting, curiously, the three souls of De André: Bubola, Pagani, Fossati. That is, those who had been there much before — Bubola in the folk records of the late '70s and early '80s; Pagani, the present; Fossati, the future in "Anime salve" (1996). As De André explained during a promotional mini-tour of the time, the album is as if it is clearly divided into two parts, the first where educated or almost-educated people speak and are thus ennobled by the Italian language, in the second part, the humble speak, the common people, and thus they express themselves in dialect (here's the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hLFECEaRRpE).

The presence of Pagani is particularly evident in the second part, where the dialect (triplet, Genoese, Sardinian, Neapolitan) is used. Mandolin, kazoo, bouzouki, Greek lyre, flute, every instrument belonging to a distant and typically regional world is played by the ex-PFM, although in some compositions a very young Sergio Conforti alias Rocco Tanica of Elio e le Storie Tese, active at the time with just one album, also intervenes on the piano, moreover quite niche.

The album opens with a recited piece, "Le nuvole":

«I chose Lalla Pisano and Maria Mereu because their voices seemed to me capable of well representing "Mother Earth", the one, indeed, that constantly sees clouds passing by and remains waiting for it to rain. It is immediately made clear that «they place themselves / between us and the sky»: on one side, they force us to look up to observe them, on the other side, they prevent us from seeing something different or higher than them.»

(Fabrizio De André)

The mix of poetry and sounds that permeates the entire album is incredible; of course, De André had already given us the joy of listening to works suspended halfway between these two arts, but I believe "Le nuvole" is the highest example of how two worlds, which some would like to be different, namely music and poetry, can be reconciled. If "Creuza de ma" was above all a more musical than literary work (certainly the lyrics mattered a lot, but all the sound research work was inhuman, and would deserve a lengthy discussion on its own) here the two souls blend, as in the subsequent "Ottocento", perhaps the only fragment that remained intact from that famous concept album that it was supposed to be.

The piece is a sort of mini-operetta with quotations from Tchaikovsky, Jacopone da Todi and a metaphorical vision on Alka-Seltzer that makes us understand to what level of texts De André had arrived (essentially the death of a son is belched like an Alka-Seltzer, just as the German bourgeoisie had "belched" Nazism for its interests).

Regarding "Ottocento":

«It is a way of singing falsely cultured, a mimic of operatic singing, suggested to me by the emphatic value of a character who is more an appliance than a man: he sucks and absorbs feelings, affections, vital organs, and objects towards which he shows a singular mental attitude: the possibility to sell and buy them. The semi-imposed voice seemed suitable to characterize the false-romantic imaginative of an uneducated and enriched monster.»

(Fabrizio De André, 1990)

«When the record was finished, Fabrizio took it home and after a few days called me. «Something's missing, it's all beautiful but a bit too light, what we really think about all this is missing, what unfortunately happened to us is missing». So a few days later we left for Sardinia, and after stocking up on big bottles of Cannonau, we hid at the Agnata, his estate in Gallura. Faber took out one of his famous notebooks, and the hundred lines of almost casual notes gathered over years of reading books and newspapers, in three days became the lucid and passionate description of the silent, painful, and pathetic coup that occurred around us without us realizing it, of the silent and definitive victory of stupidity and lack of morality over everything else. Of the defeat of reason and hope.

(Mauro Pagani)

The track also had a video, directed by Gabriele Salvatores two years before the Oscar, but it is a small symbolic work of art, as the song unfolds through images of all kinds (the minister of thunderstorms; the monkey of the Fourth Reich; Renato Curcio, the coalman; Milan floating in the orgeat bottle; jibes, it seems, at songwriters once engaged now less so, Venditti and Bennato) and a series of interpretatively challenging but fascinating and, often, prophetic metaphors (the Baggina mentioned in the song is the Pio Albergo Trivulzio in Milan from which the Tangentopoli investigation started two years later). The fear of no longer being able to conceive of a complete democracy was at the basis of the idea of the track, which is among the peaks of De André's work and perhaps one of the most prophetic, heartbreaking, and tragic pieces of the entire Italian songbook, with that "vibrant protest" left hanging there, in midair, in suspense.

The second side opens with Fossati, with "Megu Megun," and the mood softens. The people do not have the double-dealing and lecherous intrigues of the powerful, thus the B-side of the album is more sunny, at times comical. "Megu megun" is not a good example of this since it tells in Genoese dialect the ridiculous story of a hypochondriac who doesn't want to get out of bed and a doctor trying to convince him that, in short, there's nothing wrong. It would even be funny if it were not that at a certain point, the labored sound of the fake patient who doesn't want to get up because he's afraid of the world, in the most global sense, is reproduced. But the rhythm and pace of the piece are priceless.

Speaking of side A, I intentionally skipped over "Don Raffaé" (everything has already been said about it, everyone has sung it, even Gigi D'Alessio and years ago Massimo Ranieri ruined it on television without breaking a sweat), but there was a light use of the Neapolitan dialect. "La nova gelosia" is instead 100% Neapolitan. It was sung, among others, by Murolo, who with De André at the time formed a duo, and thus the idea came from there. Murolo and De André together? Of course, when the May Day Concert still made sense, they sang together the aforementioned "Don Raffaé" (link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWfniy5GozU).

I must say, I am from Milan, but the only place in Italy where I could move is Liguria, which is beautiful. You eat pasta with pesto and cima, among other things. Those who have never tried cima should repent as they have no idea what they are missing. But cima is a very ancient recipe, written in history books, not even cooking books, and Fossati and De André jokingly narrate it with "A cimma"

(LIJ)

«Çê serèn, tæra scùa
carne tennia, no fâte neigra
no tornâ dùa
Bell’oëgê straponta de tutto bon
primma de battezâla 'nto preboggion
con doi agoggioin drïto in ponta de pê
da sorvia in zù fïto ti â ponziggiæ»

(IT)

«Clear sky dark earth
tender meat, do not become black
do not turn hard
Beautiful pillow mattress of every blessing
before baptizing it in the aromatic herbs
with two large needles straight on tiptoe
from top to bottom quickly you'll prick it»

I know instead very little about Sardinia, but De André loved it, he had a house there (even though he lived in Milan) and was even kidnapped there. Then he forgave and gave us "Hotel Supramonte." In "Monti di Mola," he pens with gusto a portrait, albeit somewhat cynical, of a village in Gallura where a man and a donkey decide (okay, let's say he decides) to get married and the whole community gets involved in preparing the wedding, only to find out that the two subjects (the man and the donkey) are "brothers in primu," and thus the wedding falls apart. Energetic rhythm, Flavio Premoli on the accordion and the Tazenda as choir.

A memorable album that also sold very well. It was 1990.