Mauro Pelosi
Il Signore dei Gatti

Once, sprawled on the couch and tightly embraced with my wife, I was listening to a record, I think it was by De Gregori. At one point, she got serious and said: "Now this is a classic pig record!" Nothing particularly erotic had piqued our libido, but she simply meant that of the entirety of the work, she wouldn't throw away anything, just like with a pig as our wise farmer grandparents judiciously taught us. I liked that definition and decided to make it mine, but also to use it sparingly to give it the value it deserves and especially that the album bearing such an appellation deserves. One of my few "pig records" is "Il Signore dei Gatti" by Mauro Pelosi, a Roman singer-songwriter with four LPs to his credit, spread between 1972 and 1979, each more beautiful than the last, but which for reasons a bit mysterious to me didn't sell anything or almost. True, he was a "cursed" singer-songwriter who did not belong to the Roman Folkstudio circle and did not launch politicized messages, instead speaking intimately of personal conditions, often relatable, almost always "borderline," but we were full of desire for knowledge and dissemination of what, being different, could have fascinated, thus precisely the perfect audience in the most receptive decade. Instead, Mauro Pelosi, with incredible lightness, managed to fly over all the possibilities of deserved recognition to ultimately crash into grotesque anonymity. "Il Signore dei Gatti" is his last album, perhaps written with more sincerity without the conviction that he had to amaze at all costs those who were listening because probably by then artistically disillusioned, the one most musically and textually curated. The album in question is decidedly his most singer-songwriter work, in the strictest sense of the term, without those "progressive" veins that ambiguously had somewhat conditioned his belonging and certainly without that research and experimentation of his previous records. A bucolic and decidedly successful work. After so much subtraction, however, we are not left with a minimalist work, but a satisfying showcase of beautiful songs veiled with ancestral sadness, as in the magnificent "Laghi di città," a metaphor for difficult coexistences: "..when my desire for you turns into a glance with cut breath and intentions in the throat, when words are sounds that fill the brain and you notice nothing, not even that it's raining.." these are certainly not trivial words, or as in the piece "Il Poeta," a receptacle of illusions carried on for a lifetime: "...Illusions are real, sometimes you can touch them with your hands, and a rented room becomes a granary. His mother yellowed in the family album, next to the radio, remembered the war..." or as in the track that gives the album its title curiously autobiographical through osmosis: "I dreamed of a window and outside many people chasing a cat, with silver whiskers and opal teeth, looking for me, no longer had claws to scratch..." A work that still moves today and, precisely because it is not bound to any fashion or compromise, is absolutely current. Of this work, I guarantee you, you won't throw away anything, not even one track, like the good and docile pig if you only have the patience to listen to it with mind and heart.

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