Kip Winger
THISCONVERSATIONSEEMSLIKEADREAM

Life was a perfect merry-go-round for Kip Winger until 1996. It's just that when everyone falls down, his wife ended up underneath. Ground, indeed. I thought she would take away all of Kip's creativity, his innate ability to mix duty (hit pop rock) with pleasure (hard rock with visionary avant-garde insights). Up to that point, Kip made music in a unique way. When you're a teenager, it happens that you binge on records for which you'll later suffer teasing, derision, and self-shame for having listened to them. For many, melodic hard rock is like that (but not for me). The Winger, on the other hand, except for the big ballads for making out (they were good for something, right? no, many naïve people would say) had written and performed unusual tracks, working on such overused material that it became moldable at will. Not that they started a revolution, but they put in a lot of dignity and a few simple good ideas to pave the way for interesting codes and perspectives. For me, absolutely engaging. Dignity, as I was saying. Something that maybe never really appealed to Americans because, after all, they were always a jewel of the second lines.

A bullet to the temple of this digression and we're back in 1996, in an empty house full of mirages where the only thing clear is the whiskey level line in the bottle that refuses to stay still. So, this can't go on. Or it could go on, except there are children, images, and sounds making it clear to our man that some things remain unsaid and there's still someone to confide in: the audience. Time passes, athermal, isolated, devoid of any placement. The phone rings, rings another twenty times, and inside Kip, a giant piece of music finds its way that who knows how it would sound in the studio. Twenty calls, twenty among friends and family, twenty - plus Kip - in the recording studio. What are a mandolin, a grand piano, violins, cellos, trumpets, and flutes doing when talking about Winger? It's not a joke. It’s the genesis of an album that was hard to anticipate and that crystallized a moment of pain and sweetness in an extremely clear way, of which there are no doubts. That man is just like that. There are weaknesses, tremors, waking up startled in the middle of the night, absence and emptiness, thousands of thoughts of impossible and cosmic revenge, hands and caresses, warm love, in bed. And the sweat, the moans, the birth and the death, a house as big as the universe and as small as the period that will be at the end of this sentence. We all know very well how infinitely driving we feel in trying to inflate ourselves with thoughts to avoid ugly ones, and how much we enjoy going unnoticed while we dominate the world because we’ve just had love. There is all this normal human being, there is a form of power exercised only on oneself by Kip, an unprecedented elasticity and an expressive urgency born of the moment that either you seize it on the fly or one day you'll feel like a fool.

There's no way to beat the one certain thing in life, there's no irrational grip that holds. There’s only the way each of us manages to construct (damn, if only everyone could do it!) to throw hooks in every direction and then see which one works best. Kip Winger tried with music and did well. He completely abandoned the big guitars and glam slams and, by dictating only the melodic lines, he left everyone to fantasize in an orchestra that has little to do with the dreamy but that deals with dreams wonderfully. It took the death of his other half to bring out the livelier and more vital Kip.

This rock opera is not for the Pharisees of indie rock. Eh eh. Don't expect to enter into something that mixes jazz, blues, or who knows what. This album is Kip Winger in absolute value and therefore without any type of accompanying sign. It is that intelligence with its frills that this time are not bent to the flirtatious demands of record labels. It's an album that no one could have denied him and that turned out to be a composed success, certainly unforgettable for many people worldwide.

To give you a clearer idea, I might suggest it to seasoned reviewers like pier_paolo_farina (who certainly already knows it) or fedezan76 (maybe he knows it too). Otherwise, I suggested it to myself, as a palliative for my damn itches. And don't take me literally.