Lucio Battisti
Ancora tu: Greatest Hits

THE REVIEW

When a Poet, capable of conveying "emotions" through words, meets a musical Talent who, besides playing guitar, keyboard, drums, and piano, is able to put those words onto a staff, like a bullet, and shoot them straight into the heart of the listener, then success, the true kind, the kind that remains engraved in the stone of music history, is inevitable.

This Album cannot be considered the absolute best, it does not feature "emozioni," which I believe to be a masterpiece of Italian music, the true "song of the century," nor does it include "anima latina" that Mogol deemed his best lyrics, and many, many others. So the choice of tracks was based on a specific intention to highlight that some musical choices, innovative yet risky when addressing the public, were found to be correct, suitable for the times, arising from the mind of a forerunner who anticipated musical trends and tastes just a beat ahead... just enough to surprise, without overdoing it: a continuous logical and balanced search for new sounds and novel arrangements, a natural growth, not an obsessive and desperate chase for newness at all costs. After the separation of these extraordinary Talents, Battisti still climbed the charts, but this matters very little to those who follow him and to himself: that perfect bond was sorely missing in the vinyl grooves produced after the breakup, but our Battisti would never have admitted it.

Returning to the work, "Ancora tu" is the synthesis of what he had absorbed in terms of musical innovations and recording techniques, while "dove arriva quel cespuglio" also from 1976 is the true dismantling of a wall built by the songwriters of the time that did not allow seeing what was on the other side. The entire album, released in 1993, is the verification of where the Artist had reached, a moment of reflection, the state of the art, a looking back just to be sure not to have forgotten anything. Mogol and Battisti spoke of love, through new and innovative music, but love was still the theme that vibrated in those records, at a time when sentimentalism reeked of mustiness and the youth protests flared up with a thousand fires from politics to culture, those words of love, simple, intense, very delicate, touched the deepest part of that generation. But even those after and those after them. Some Artists are timeless; they are called legends.