Francesco Guccini
Stanze di vita quotidiana

The year was 1974, and after the immense "Radici," Francesco Guccini continued exploring the human soul by shifting the perspective from past to present. It is, in fact, his present at that time that emerges from the six lengthy compositions that make up the album; even past events or memories are filtered through a reflection aiming to set a decisive point, to try to make a balance. It's one of the least celebrated albums by Guccini; even the author himself reportedly considered it his least successful work, the famous Bertoncelli's invective stemmed from this... and yet.

And yet, the tracks of this work emit an "ethical power" that, thirty years later, appears even more powerful and granite-like. Francesco's deep voice rises here to the role of secular preacher of human miseries, unfolding rhymes and sentences, doubts and poetry. It is true, a chaotic and percussive arrangement partly ruins the album's atmosphere, but perhaps it is those very sounds that make it suspended in time, not like a cloud, but like a granite block hanging over our emptiness. The album opens with the most famous track of the collection, "Canzone delle osterie di fuori porta", a calm yet bitter reflection on the passing and transcending of time in his and our lives. The discourse continues in the subsequent "Canzone della triste rinuncia" with unusually cryptic lyrics whose general meaning is perfectly traceable in the title. As one grows, paths narrow, and doors close. It is necessary to renounce what one is not and can never be. "Canzone della vita quotidiana", which follows, is a lucid analysis of the meanness of human life "with the oases in midsummer and at Christmas", steeped in pointless efforts, selfishness, and hypocrisies. On what was the B side of the original record, there are three other pieces. In "Canzone per Piero", Guccini outdoes himself, giving us a poem in unrhymed hendecasyllables dedicated more to the overcoming of youth than to his friend Piero. A theme also explored in the subsequent "Canzone delle ragazze che se ne vanno". A special mention for the last track of the collection, generally overlooked. "Canzone delle situazioni differenti" is yet another masterpiece of the album. A long guitar introduction (a rarity in Guccini's production) precedes the beginning of the singing, where, without interruption, memories of love and invocations of anger are mixed. It is one of the most evocative texts ever written by the Pavane songwriter, capable of alternating images full of sweetness: "then I wrote your name, pouring slowly on the snow the strange thing that looked like wine, its ruby color fascinated me: why did you erase it with your foot?" to unusually direct rabid lines: "O evening, come quickly! O new world, arrive! Revolution, change something! Erase the usual grin of this now corroded weary civilization that drags itself."

That's it, one last note, when I discovered this album, I was 18; I liked it, but I didn't make it mine. Re-listened to it today, at the same age Guccini was at the time of writing, everything becomes clearer. This is a point of reflection that can be applied to much of Guccini's work: one loves it a lot as a young person, then often abandons it searching for something more fulfilling, then, after the thirties, one returns to it with the necessary humility to understand that: "I believe we know it's different if things have then been more stingy, you accept them, you move on, and you haven't lost if they are different from dreaming because it's no joke to know how to continue."

But that's another song…