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Rating: "Love in a Prenuragic 600".
In this week's interview, journalist Anna Piccioni asks the island singer-songwriter Piero Marras: "Why are emigrants so attached to musical traditions and the Limba?"
"This attachment," he replies, "I think mainly concerns the older generation who finds in the sounds of music and the language something of themselves, of their own culture, and takes pride in it. It's different for the young people."
"Fuori Campo" marked the beginning of the solo career for the now 57-year-old author from Nuoro. First released in the distant '78, it was re-released in '97 with the addition of two unreleased tracks: Notte Lituana and Si Deus Cheret (If God Wills). Nothing can prepare the new listener or the one almost thirty years later, nor can you go through these eleven songs without being enchanted by the evocative sounds that Marras continues to share with us.
Real and imaginary snippets, stimuli influenced mainly by his land where he draws insights and inspiration. Rhythms and socio-anthropological conditions are conveyed through his personal experience, sometimes amusingly, other times with brutal and disconcerting sincerity. Yet infused with meaning, giving voice to broad and colorful feelings and moods that range from common anxiety to an arcane mystery.
In many of these, it's a poetic dialogue as in the archaic Sardinian tradition of improvised poetry. In at least seven songs, still all in Italian, he interprets by alternating one or more protagonists in the theater of life. The contents, themes, imperceptible almost not always clear the logos: it represents a culture that has a mythological aspect even in modern times. The displacement from the motherland, the tender call to the magic of that first time, a belonging often limited not beyond the borders of that mare nostrum. He spares no one, armed as he is with sharp irony, demystifying the adored father, himself, and those who welcome him every evening.
As a good singer-songwriter, one who wears his role, one paid to sing us truths otherwise denied elsewhere, Marras does it in ballads with a sweet tone, bringing us the omen of an inevitable drifting away from everything; in arpeggios and song, it sounds like the noise of a source gushing from a Tirso tributary.
...and with guitar slides that make you ask yourself, "had he also read that episode of when Corto Maltese..."
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