Federico Fiumani
Confidenziale

If you are normal people, in the morning, when you open the closet, you should find some skeletons inside. And then you should feel a sense of fear if the skeleton was kindly gifted to you, or of annoyance and disgust if you gifted it to yourself. Common sense should suggest you quickly retrieve the clothes you'll disguise yourself with to face a new day, shut the door, and forget that your past is somehow present. Life, for many of us, teaches this: being deficient in sincerity, safeguarding the well-being of the moment hoping that the dark shades remain only in the sky. And it matters little if it must always be autumn. Selfishness, closing off, and not caring a damn, in the gleam of teeth freshly polished by a dentist who doesn't issue invoices but only ruthless judgments on other people's mouths, and who eats with other people's mouths.

Then there are a few others who will be whole collectors of bones. But who love to talk about those skeletons. About the remnants of flesh that still seem to be moist with life. There are singers of well-being and malaise, euphoria and melancholy, illusion and failures. People who, according to others, love to disgrace themselves for a few pennies and maybe do it for some sort of mental instability. Maybe they try to see how many fish bite and cast the bait.

The bait, Fiumani. A prolific father of personal-pop moments, an author of bipolar affairs. If you take him electric, it’s new wave, punk, and post-punk. If you take him as he is, stripped to the bone, you can get close to his auteur and art-house side. You feel the urgent urge to say it, damn it. That tobacconists are fantastic, that cigarettes are out at eleven-thirty on a holiday, and that Easter can also be this. A day of self-imposed rejections. An Italian with a guitar in hand, absolutely impossible to export. The anti-Cutugno, maybe it’s funny but I like to think of it that way. The fortress wall that defends me (us?) from the shoddiness that belongs to many Italian-surname-forged individuals cheerfully masticated from Russia to the Andes.

The infallible guitar weapon shoots like the good gunmen's shots in Sergio Leone’s movies, if good is an adjective applicable in this case. The guitar is a proud follower of a voice that first takes us, then doesn't hold us, and finally grabs us again. Because the important thing is not to sing but to interpret your strength, your ability to sell yourself, and also your discomfort. A voice refined with sandpaper, youthful and beautiful, but also interrupted, perhaps, by an expressive question like “what the hell am I doing here”. Perhaps, the dilemma that a Fiumani should carry with him for life. There are stages as big as squares, and squares waiting cramped even in small and decrepit, stinking places, with only one spotlight to illuminate an entire stage. I like to think that this hero-like figure exists, capable of shining with their own light. Necessary like water you notice when it’s gone, desolate as during the factory closures when it’s hot, intelligent and attentive when choosing to swallow Dalla and Roversi’s verses and make you shed a tear without making a fuss, years later, listening to a "Tu parlavi una lingua meravigliosa" that speaks of any station, just as the lives of those who pass through it (ours) are also “any.”

Confidenziale gives us the strength of these slices of life and this life sliced and placed on a plate in the fridge, waiting for someone to pass by and take it to cook it before it’s too late. Confidenziale is a live formula still fully in vogue for Fiumani, which probably costs little to the venue owners who host him. From a certain point of view, it’s like having Diaframma without the bass and drums. If you widen the view, it’s having more; it’s having immediacy at home to make sad guests happy.

Sometimes you need to be lashed by another's leather belt to observe yourself from the outside. Confidenziale is an album of genuine Italian leather, of suffering and anger. Here one catches the genesis of great songs, the lighthouse’s confidence of an era, the uncertainty and inadequacy felt in the spotlight's circle of light, and you’re the only one in it without knowing who you’re actually talking to. Listening carefully you feel that at that moment it truly wasn’t worth starting over.

And yet we will restart every morning, to reopen the closet and pretend nothing happened.