Lucio Dalla
Lucio Dalla

After the deep-sea apnea, one must eventually surface to catch a breath. To sit there, watching the moon quietly approaching. To find something to live for, a hypothetical life to sing about. After the seven moons of the apocalypse comes regeneration, after erotic despair comes love. Anna would have wanted to die, Marco wanted to leave far away, someone saw them return, holding hands.

This is somewhat the mood of the album, which stands halfway on the vertical path from the depths of 1977 to the hopeful Futura, though troubled, skeptical, and fearful, of 1980. A mood always oblique, ambiguous, teetering between ultimate escape and return, like Anna and Marco. There is hope even in despair, then, an unanticipated hope (to continue the oxymorons) like a Tango that unites the sky with the earth, impossible in theory. A dance, in a shabby venue, with few onlookers, but a dance that saves, and you begin to fly.

And the music awakens alongside the moods, the emotions. A pulsating bass, sax solos, rock rhythms, giving the boost to climb out of the quagmire of pessimism, cheerful cadences on words that continue – at times – to dismantle the meaning of days. And the tense, dramatic strings, somewhat threatening yet intoxicating, like stories of dances and hopes despite life being little and always the same. Or seemingly elementary arrangements (in appearance, the filigrees are very delicate), mocking in their ostentatious predictability, when the words demand the whole stage.

Dalla is more domesticated, but retains the gypsy sagacity of a song that knows how to condense nuanced and complex meanings into simple images, knows how to tell the Apocalypse almost without a hitch. And here he sings with even more energy because he is no longer the humble prophet of the end of the world, but a herald who strains his voice to say that after death, of the world or every day, there is always an after, a rebirth, a dawn, a new year, a dance, a tango. The emblematic city here is Milan, which takes you underground or to the moon, a mystery between life and death (in Dalla, it will be Rome in The Night of Miracles: there, the journey is more openly positive, after emerging from apnea, one moves faster, higher).

An adherence to life that is almost ashamed, that doesn't want to fully admit it. Like the cover photo, melancholic yet illuminated, a Lucio that nonetheless does not avert his gaze. And the world's misery? Let's play with it, turn it into a Leopardian projection towards The Year to Come. You see, dear friend, what must be invented to laugh over it, to keep hoping?