Ramona Cordova
The Boy Who Floated Freely

Ramona Cordova is a young man.

From Arizona. And he is also his grandmother. The boy who floated freely is Giver. I am in love with him. With her. Is he or she Giver or Ramona? His grandmother?

Let’s be clear, in love like that, as in a fairy tale. A quirky and minimal fairy tale that heads straight for a happy ending and finds it only when everything seems destined for a resounding crash into bitterness. Just in time to taste the bitter flavor of disillusionment after savoring the delight of the dream. *

The happy ending spins in my player, the boy floats around here: it could be a magnificent day, if it weren’t a somewhat crappy day. And such a day could (should?) make certain frankly impossible "falsettos" unbearable. And the pan sound of certain guitar strums (but I've always liked the pan sound, so it doesn’t count). And that naïve way of thinking about a song, that absolute lack of appeal guaranteed by trills, noises, "glitch" knick-knacks, today absolutely essential.

Here there are only Ramona, a wheezing little organ, guitar, something that sounds like drums. And that voice perpetually on the brink, inclined to nothing, determined to everything. But with such... normal grace.

And yet no. Not only is it not unbearable, not only do I not throw it across the room to hit some circulating human or particularly hateful objects. This small, crumbly, and moving "joke" even saves this somewhat crappy day for me a bit. Not entirely, of course. The brief album of a twenty-two-year-old American with Hispanic, Puerto Rican, Filipino, Haitian blood isn’t supposed to perform miracles. He’s already a miracle himself, with all those ethnicities in his veins. **

And I think I'm taking a risk, telling you about it. About Ramona, I mean. After all, between us, it's just started. Who knows how long it will last, if it will last at all. But you know perfectly well that when these unexpected lightning strikes catch you in the middle of a distracted listen, the temptation to talk about it with someone is often stronger than modesty and uncertainty. You are that someone.

Ramona Cordova, "The Boy Who Floated Freely".

A very simple album. Full of grace. Already in stores across half of Europe, available in Italy since October.

* "The Boy Who Floated Freely" is truly a fairy tale: its songs tell of a boy who runs away from home and his adventures on an apparently deserted island. And of a love, generated by a magic potion, that disappears, casting him into despair but returning to him a lightness that will allow him to "take flight again.”

** Behind the strange female moniker lies Ramón Vicente Alarcón. Born in Arizona in '84, to a Hispanic-Puerto Rican (daddy) and Haitian-Filipino (mommy) couple, he chose the stage name of his grandmother, who read him the fairy tales and stories that, along with music, were his childhood passion. The use of a sort of falsetto in some tracks increases, for an unaware listener, the amusing ambiguity of the matter.