Ivano Fossati
L'Arcangelo

Of Wise Simplicity. This is an album of wise simplicity, the kind of simplicity you reach after having been everywhere, after having tried everything, experimented with everything.

After having written harmonically complex songs and others very simple, after having brushed against jazz and composed splendid soundtracks. After making the history of Italian song with a handful of masterpieces, and after making Italy dance for a whole year, and perhaps more, with a beautiful song, too often renounced. After having climbed the highest mountains of melancholy and proudly reached the summit with “La Disciplina Della Terra”, a perfect album, sad, profound, and splendidly played, something felt like it was about to change.
“Lampo Viaggiatore”, a few years ago, was a triumph of well-paced rhythms, even getting closer to blues (revisiting, to be precise…), and generally approaching sensations of serenity, even when the scores, at least literarily, tackled not-so-simple themes. Everything, however, sounded brighter, and even the very neglected guitars began to reappear (pure joy for those who loved, like myself, even the Fossati pre-"Discanto").

This album takes a further step forward. A step that will certainly lead the usual slew of pseudo-purists, kneeling before their very sad convictions, to unleash predictable choirs of "sellout", "looking at the charts", "doing easy politics" or "he's no longer himself"... And this is predictable and also a bit obvious and perhaps right, since, like for great painters, wise simplicity is a point of arrival not understandable to everyone, being superficially confusable with simple or banal simplicity. Here, just to show that the guitars are back, it starts with “Ho Sognato Una Strada”, a driven, very songwriter-like piece, that could very well have been conceived in four hands with De Gregori and which, in my opinion, the Prince would interpret very well. It is followed by more or less immediate tracks, but always kissed by an apparent simplicity that is pure pleasure. True: politics is touched with that great hymn to disenchantment for this era that is "Cara Democrazia", but love is also touched with very simple words in "L'Amore Fa", a startlingly beautiful song that pushes further along the groove marked by "Il Bacio Sulla Bocca" a few years ago. Then moments of compositional and interpretative fun in "La Cinese", with stops of pure Gaberian irony (touching explicit homage so much do those breaks resemble those of "Lo Shampoo"…), and with “Reunion”, while “Baci e Saluti” is the classic song with simple guitar arpeggio, as he hadn't done in a thousand years, and "Pianissimo" is the classic concluding track, with a broad breath, where he seems almost to be playing at being "Fossatian" so much is it all so pleasantly predictable. Again like great modern painters who, to avoid being accused of only knowing how to make cuts in canvases or lines with fingers dirty with blue paint, also excel in pure "classic" technique, so Fossati writes and records "Il Battito", an absolute masterpiece of great complexity, both musical and, above all, literary. A track that risks being misunderstood on a superficial listen but conceals within itself the confession of a man who has understood everything he needed to understand about art and language, and about the art of language, but who has decided to choose because now he is capable. A piece that instinctively would find itself at home in “La Disciplina Della Terra”, but which one then realizes is perfectly placed between "L’Arcangelo" and "La Cinese".

Even the title track is a very interesting piece, if only for the insistent percussion section and for the most beautiful self-quotation of his entire career: that electric guitar riff that is immediately recognized and delights, taken as is from that beautiful song too often renounced. Almost as if to tell us that he is always himself. No matter what. It's just a matter of understanding that today he is a wise man. And that he likes to seem simple.