Roberto Vecchioni
Milady

The '80s for the Milanese professor come to a close like this, with a black and white album. From the cover to the eight songs and the mood that characterizes them.

"Milady" is an album born out of a troubled process due to controversies with the historical producer Michelangelo Romano, an album that feels a certain weight, that of difficulties, distances, years, and reflections in front of the mirror. It's a deeply melancholic album, sad both by choice and constraint. Roberto stands there in front of himself and probably drinks a Cognac accompanied by the usual Toscano, studies himself in reflections, looks at his life and what it's part of, the children growing up and one day you will take them to school and they will no longer truly be yours. He doesn't discover anything new, and he sings about it. "The years pass, the children grow" and Vecchioni learns that "time is beauty". So, late at night and with a Baileys instead of Cognac, "Milady" really seems to be his mirror, fixed to the wall of the master bedroom. "Leonard Cohen" is arguably one of his best love songs, where in faded images a nostalgic Venice emerges, "a hotel from when you loved me, when the children weren't there yet and I only kissed your breasts". Silent streets where cars cannot run, a greenish lagoon on whose cold waters floats the past. "But Venice is just an excuse, we would have understood each other anyway".

After turning 40, Vecchioni sings about his partner, the woman who chose him, understands what is the essence of being together in life, maybe he even understands where true love lies. And he tells his story with his dual identity, a singer-songwriter constantly on tour on one side, a family man on the other: the song that gives the album its title, "Milady", represents the first of the two faces sung in an 80s rock style you can sense from a mile away while the second is found in "Certezze", which sometimes sounds like a nursery rhyme. Musically not excellent, especially in the arrangements which seem the same in all songs, the album in question becomes great for its intimacy exposed to the public, the gray shades that color it with melancholic hues and subdued emotions, along with the usual poetic vein among the highest in our music. "Gli anni" sees the memory box opening while sheets continue to fall from the calendar, "Alessandro e il mare" tells of soldiers and water, a lifelong passion, Alessandro so great outside and so small inside as he remembers the garden's fountain, "Poesia scritta in un bar" is born almost as a joke and "Mariù" is perhaps the weakest link.

It closes with "Polo Sud", a long and sad confession of someone who decided to leave to forget but then encountered nothingness, the cold voice sings a chilling story before it lingers a bit too long on phrases and choruses. Almost three months after the Sanremo triumph with a song neither shameful nor praiseworthy, listening to "Milady" one understands why some recognition was deservedly given to him, even if at the wrong moments (I'll also mention the Festivalbar of "Voglio una donna").

No surprises in this album, no twists, Vecchioni is as always. But here, a little more.