Francesca Del Duca
It Is Love

THE AWAKENING OF THE SOUL

In my, all things considered, not brief journey as a music enthusiast, I encounter important albums on a daily basis, albums that are valuable and certainly have a memorable impact; however, much more rarely, perhaps also due to a personal insecurity of mine, do I seize the occasion to dedicate a detailed review that manages to transcend their general spontaneity.

Therefore, when I decide to collect notes and reflections on a work, to take them out from my drafts, and then to offer them to the judgment of an audience, it means that this piece has forcefully captured my attention, leaving an unforgettable mark in my mind and heart.

In this case, in particular, I want to dedicate, in my modest capacity and possibilities, a more than deserved space to Francesca Del Duca, a musician who is also, on a human level, delightful, whom I follow and personally know, and her beautiful album "It Is Love" (2019).

For those unfamiliar with the artist, I provide some guiding coordinates that might help readers understand her training, background, and attitude.

Francesca Del Duca, born in Naples on October 11, 1982, is an Italian singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist.

Her musical activity originated in 2009, the year she graduated in classical percussion at the "Conservatorio Di Musica Di Salerno". In the same years, the artist studied and explored various national and international traditional music instruments: from the tambourine and the tammorra of our Italian peninsula to the African djembe, the Arab darbuka and riqq, the Latin congas to the Indian tablas and mridangam.

The following years, particularly from 2010 to 2013, were fundamental for the personal development and maturation of the singer-songwriter. This period spent in New York offered her the opportunity to work first as a musician, then as a music director, and to actively collaborate with internationally flavored artists, such as jazz musicians Kenny Werner and Eli Yamin, up to Stefan Hoskuldsson from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.

After a year-long stint in 2014 in Sydney, Francesca returned to Italy and, thanks to the sponsorship of guitarist Elio Manzo from the famous Italian band Bisca, she met the master of Italian Folk and Taranta, Eugenio Bennato, with whom she has been engaged in significant world-class tours since 2017 as a percussionist and vocalist.

Her first solo work, "It Is Love", subject of this discussion, consists of 11 tracks where the predominant matrix is Soul and Pop, skillfully united, as needed, with seductive Folk shades, Rock evolutions, and Gospel outbursts.

The album, with an approximate duration of 40 minutes, opens with the very sweet "May I", whose structure resembles a beautiful prayer rhythmically marked by the strings of the heart, where the artist hopes, in a sort of self-reminder, to always be kind and grateful towards herself, the people, and the life surrounding her.

From the very first track, one can sense the leitmotif of the entire album expressed simultaneously in a dual axis: the first, the sweetness, expressed in the textual, and thus written component, the second progressively reverberating in the singing, and thus in an "oral" dimension, characterized by passionate, warm, vibrant, marvelous, and compelling vibes, yet, simultaneously, masterfully caressing and graceful.

"Everything Inside" with its delicate and hypnotic charge, offers the listener the possibility to close their eyes, float in the air, abandon themselves to the voice that arises from the depths, the source of the soul, the source of life. The track carefully retraces the stages of personal self-discovery, the fear of losing one's certainties and identity, but equally also the certainty that only in the depths of the spirit can the sense of one's existence and the purest meaning of being in the world be found.

"It Is Love", the eponymous track that gives the album its title, shows how only love can genuinely connect human beings, brothers to sisters, mother earth to her children, and how the present should be actively lived, looking at both the past and the future with a benign smile, reminiscent of Leopardi, learning to forgive oneself, one's mistakes, and the inherent fear, dramatically embedded in the human dimension, of destiny and its infinite possibilities.

"Infinite Treasures" gently indicates the way to open one's heart and mind, how it is difficult, but necessary, to genuinely offer oneself for dialogue with others and sometimes show those still-bleeding wounds imprinted in memory. Nonetheless, the treasure kept inside oneself sublimates in opening one's feelings and trusting the love felt and cultivated internally. It is not enough to act as "rainwater collectors", but one must let oneself "flow" and surrender to the spectacle of existence.

"Don't Blame Yourself", with its tribal percussions and Gospel overtures, talks about the limits we too often self-impose in life, also due to a restrictive society not inclined to respect others' freedom and feelings as an abstraction. Find your quality, enhance it, become a precious gem, stand out!

"Peace Begins Inside", retracing the steps left by "Everything Inside", crystallizes the meaning of letting go, forgiving, liberating oneself from burdens that daily belittle and annihilate both the mind and heart, breathing freedom, giving oneself time and value.

"Respect (All is One)" slowly leads the listener to a hieratic vision with a pantheistic structure, where all creation is permeated by God, not to be necessarily understood in a religious or Christological matrix, but rather naturalistic: the "Deus Sive Natura", to use one of the most famous cosmological and metaphysical maxims, of philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

"The Thing You Say", probably the most rock-infused track of the album, echoes ghosts of distant memories, unkept promises, broken relationships, failed compromises, scars, with sweat, sewn back again. The frameworks that constitute human relationships are complex, changing, prismatic, containing the seed of the deeply human contradiction and illogicality permeating our existence.

"Be Free" thematically composes an evident diptych with the previous track, subtly outlining the sense of fragility, abandonment, loneliness, the dignity residing in suffering, the deafening roar of the silence of the mind, and the desire for freedom that time, in the right way, prepares to bring.

"I Know Why" further insists on the power of life, sometimes on the necessity, perhaps even selfish, more than to love to be loved, on the salvific function of tears, that of amending before turning the page and moving forward, passing through inner torment.

The last track of the album "Try Again", is the most important warning the work intends to leave, that is, to try despite everything, despite the failures: persist day after day, hour after hour, moment after moment. Falls will always be noisier than triumphs, but the latter, although often brought back in silence, can leave a much deeper and enduring mark in life.

In the end, the "Memento" of life, even if seemingly simplistic, can only be contained and found in this: in the Manichaean struggle between success and failure, between laughter and tears, between the deafening fall and the silent rising, between pain and happiness.