Niccolò Fabi
Solo Un Uomo

Vaguely snobbish, definitely cultured. Beneath his now-famous hair, a lucidly thinking brain. Niccolò Fabi is like those wines that improve with age. Not that the prerequisites were lacking…. Quite the contrary! From the very first album, an extraordinary artistic sensitivity, a sharp irony, and above all, excellent listening skills could already be glimpsed.

The early works, however, still suffered from a certain naiveté, perhaps due to age. Not anymore. Now Niccolò has grown up, he's become a man, in fact, “Just a man,” and in these ten tracks, he reveals and bares himself. Thus emerge certainties and convictions, but also fears and insecurities, bursts of affection, and  small meannesses, “The fear of being outside or inside” in short, as he sings in one of the most intense moments of the album. But Niccolò has crossed the fateful threshold of the ““forties” and has even started a family, and this milestone is put to music in a small masterpiece of intimacy named “Attesa e inaspettata,” a sort of full stop and new beginning, a rebirth, a new youth different from the previous one, but nonetheless a restart, because “Attesa e inaspettata arrives the second life in that instant when you cut the veil and you're on the other side. You are never prepared enough, but you have always been ready”. There is also one of the most beautiful declarations of love ever written (“La promessa”), which has nothing to envy from a masterpiece like “La cura” by Maestro Battiato (“our love gets its hands dirty every day in the mud more than certain ideas more than the tides more than the certainties our love is suspended in the void but with feet on the ground more than certain ideas more than the tides more than the certainties one has”). Age thus brings a new maturity, and Niccolò is finally aware that “the more time passes, the less interest I have in wasting my voice without rancor, really, you are wonderful, but for the future, let’s each go our own way” and that to reach that milestone called happiness, “it would be enough to do what one has chosen not accepting the blackmail victorious or defeated raise your head see you”.  The wonder at the euphemistically tragicomic twists of human behavior, however, is not accompanied by a pseudo-moralizing arrogance, as “we are all the expression of the same planet”.

The only  ferocious, albeit whispered, denunciation against the degeneration of a country, a people and – perhaps – of the human race (“we graze, we graze even in a random field, and may it be near home because we only migrate from the sofa to the windowsill, prisoners with the terror of being freed, of being free”) comes with the last track, a warning, a call to arms of the silent majority of the country with the hope that “a word thrown into the sea with a motive and a lifebuoy that simply does its duty, a word that does not sink perhaps generates a wave that ripples the flatness and washes away the filth”. And so truly “Words that do good” are those written by Niccolò, who, after three years from “Novo Mesto,” gives us his most heartfelt, most thought-out, and most sincere album. In other words, a masterpiece.