Lucio Dalla
Henna

"Enough blood now, can't you see, we're not even standing anymore, a bit of mercy"

These few words, whispered over a very sweet melody that perfectly wraps around them, are enough to capture our attention. It's the end of 1993, and Lucio Dalla composes what might be his swan song; an album somber right from the cover, which, at the time, sold very little (coming from the crude success of 'Attenti al Lupo') and doesn’t contain any of the most famous hits from the Bolognese artist. 'Henna' is quite possibly the illegitimate child of that success, almost as if Dalla, as on other occasions (for example with the 1983 album) wanted to challenge himself again, disappointing those who expected a work mirroring the previous one.

Yet the roads leading to the creation of an album are the most diverse, and sometimes, almost magically, the final product can turn out to be enormously better than the sum of its components. The flavor of 'Henna' also benefits from an ingredient as necessary as it is difficult to find on the market: sincerity. And everything changes. The need for love, solitude, the loss of both physical and emotional contact with others and with reality, the alienation of the big city are the themes touched upon in the album. The title track features an enveloping melody perfectly adhering to the lyrics: "Alright, I believe in love" claims Lucio, because "in this dark future" it will be "the pain that will change us," yet still love to save us. Following are 'Liberi', an electronic nursery rhyme, and 'Rispondimi', one of the album's cornerstones. A dialogue between a man and a woman "so alone in the middle of the city," lost in a love besieged by life: "but you defend me" the lovers promise each other "from monotony and banality, from this kind of fright that grabs us and then leaves". One of the peaks of the post-Roversi Dalla, simple but profoundly evocative images, a beautiful duet of voices that overturns the mediocrity of other similar proposals, a painful and sincere inspiration.

It is then Marcello Mastroianni's voice introducing 'Cinema', another piece kissed by grace. It's a joyous search, naturally a search for love, conducted in improbable places, between "ice cream stalls" and "traffic jams."
It's already 'Domenica', the day of solitude, in "this toilet of a city," between two distant lovers, "distant as statues" and the day passes silently from the heat of the afternoon to the cool of the evening, useless, empty, thrown away without any possibility of human contact. Contact which sometimes can also be resolved through the phone, like in the bizarre and intense 'Erosip', the story of a couple who, having different work schedules, communicate (and love each other) almost exclusively over the phone. But the request for contact is pressing: "come if you pass by, at least you see me, you understand, you touch me you lick me you know I feel like it". Seeing each other, talking to each other, touching each other. As in the cold but increasingly heartfelt 'Don't touch me' where "Anna doesn't live here anymore, Laura has gone away, Valerio I don't hear anymore, we kind of lost each other, partly my fault" and again solitude, the loss of friendships... Beautiful and moving 'Latin Lover' (remembered as the soundtrack of the movie "Come due coccodrilli"), an airy melody, a desperate need for love for an 'old-time playboy' trapped in his 'coat', crossing a winter Riccione, marked in the sky by "airplanes, rockets, and comets" and by "some pieces of the past that since it's already past should not be there anymore". Until the final invocation "brother we need to fly in clearer skies, we must learn to dream to be free, so we won't have to fly to be free". Caustic and bitter is instead 'Merdman', which narrates the fall on earth of an alien "with the turd on his forehead" destined to quickly become the hero of talk shows, a mockery of the ongoing degeneration of television programming.

The album closes with 'Treno', a great song that in some moments reminds us of the melodic oddities from the Roversi period. A journey through Europe orphaned by the Berlin Wall, on a train "that runs and flows towards the two thousand", it runs between soldiers and tanks, between old and new fascists, it runs toward a still unknown tomorrow.

If you think Lucio Dalla has been finished for at least twenty years, listen to this album. You will reconsider. Ok, musically it’s an electronic pop that might make you frown, ok the voice is no longer that of 'Eliogabalo Imperatore' (never heard of it?); but the ten tracks of 'Henna' are illuminated by flashes of inspiration, sincerity, and grace.