Roberto Vecchioni
Calabuig, Stranamore ed altri incidenti

We're talking about a moment of transition in Vecchioni's biography, but an album that's anything but transitional. A true gem, in my opinion, his second-best album ever. Although the impression of being in front of a great work I had immediately, it took me time to understand it; it required familiarity, many listens, and a bit of imagination. It is not a simple album; perhaps it's the most cryptic, one of the last before choosing a clearer and more straightforward poetic.

To grasp its most intimate meaning, just listen carefully to the 'title-track,' a spoken track where among strange references, it refers to an intellectual poet searching for values of goodness and purity in a perhaps idealized past. What is instead known and evident throughout the album is the estrangement, the distancing from the present, the exclusion from affections and many important trends in previous albums. The last album before this closed with an unusual track for its gloom and despair, 'L'ultimo spettacolo'; in this one, we do not find the balance of the new life after that disappointment, there are no references to this story, things that will happen, exorcizing it, perhaps, in 'Robinson' and especially in 'Montecristo' where the issue will be examined 'under x-rays'. This is the album of unsaid things, absences, and distance.

'L'estraneo' is obsessed with regaining a capacity to love, an expression in every experience that instead reveals to be in vain, even though, in the background, there appears a reassuring figure, necessary, even if perhaps just a hope, so 'Stranamore' lists many alternative loves, which, however, are not those of the affection that was lost; in front of the many defeats that man encounters to quench his thirst, there is, however, a happy ending, a fruit, a daughter, something beautiful, that remains.

The track that, more than any other, serves as a key to interpret the entire album is perhaps 'Il castello', an apparently off-theme storytelling, narrating of a fairy abandoned by her man, who waits. Actually, I see the transposition of the personal story, someone who remains alone, someone else who has left, or perhaps was never truly there.

The tracks 'Sette meno uno' are clearer, where the story of a missing man is narrated, someone who left never to return, precisely not to return to conventions, to things believed to be true that did not become certainties (the marital affection?), and 'Ninni' where there is the other side of the album, the search for 'new' ancient values, pure ones. Here the past is indeed idealized, so much so as to make Vecchioni meet his family from twenty years before. In the story of the album, it's evident how it's an attempt to return to certainties, to a successful and solid family model, to a warm and welcoming and reassuring past, to avoid making an assessment of a present full of doubts, confusion, in fact, his marriage would break shortly afterwards, but it hadn't yet, and so uncertainty and ambiguity dominate the tracks of this period.

The only tracks I haven't mentioned are 'A te', a story of abandonment, and 'Il capolavoro', the latter being a track I like a lot and which contributes to making this album a very important work. A Vecchioni with his back to the wall, with no more women to sing about, with a difficult family situation, thus a gloomy album, difficult, the complete opposite of the other great Vecchioni masterpiece 'Elisir', where the problems were quite different and the certainty of daily life allowed him to question more complex systems, on artistic coherence as on that of everyday life. Two very different albums, but indeed the two best episodes of Vecchioni in the '60s, '70s, and '80s.