Years ago Vasco Rossi, when he was still an innovative and original singer-songwriter, proudly admitted his battistian-jannacian inspiration. Indeed, if he harmonically loved Lucio, his delta chords, his transitions from major to minor, and a certain love for rhythms and the way of cutting chords, "literarily" he was evidently fascinated by Jannacci's high absurdity, by his joking about everything with apparent nonsense.

If we try to mix, almost as if they were cooking ingredients, the characteristics of Lucio and those of Enzo that I mentioned, and we try to "update" everything in the style and aesthetics of the eighties, well..., it’s likely that the result is not too far from the best Vasco, the one starting in 1978 and ending in 1983. In any case, the love for Lucio Battisti is not a recent thing: it has very deep and distant roots. If I'm not mistaken, in an ancient interview Vasco even said that a dream in the drawer was precisely a tribute album to Lucio Battisti. Well: today we see the first fruit of that idea. A cover of an absolutely lesser-known song (at least today), guest of a great Battisti album, but not signed by the protagonist, having as its only (apparent?) signatures Donida and Mogol. Lucio's song challenged, as always, tastes, intonation, ridicule, to finally settle in the hyperuranion of perfect things, so often and so well inhabited by Battisti's works. The chorus “felicitaaaà....”, sung, and yelled in falsetto by Lucio, is a pearl today incomprehensible (today people settle for that idiot Bocelli who says Battisti sang badly...: yes, probably to sing the Ave Maria at weddings he wasn’t just good... but it was the price to pay to do in Italy something similar to what Bowie or McCartney were doing elsewhere, and not to jump cheerfully with a crab step back to Claudio Villa's times...).

Well: today Vasco takes that piece, updates it in sound, and shifts it in key, to soar through the chorus not in falsetto but in the most classic and triumphant of Vaschian choruses, the ones which, like it or not, make stadiums jump. The song is easily listened to: it is written (back then) very well, and it is arranged, sung, and played properly. Two considerations, at this point, can be made: first, the “animus” with which Vasco does these things. Malice or sincerity? Always difficult to distinguish, in the post-eighties Vasco. Perhaps the purest cunning could have led him to sing songs like “il tempo di morire” or “il mio canto libero”... who knows. Then, and it’s this point that Vasco should also consider, a good cover album is certainly much more interesting than a modest album of originals (moreover, lately, written by others...). A Battisti album or generally a cover album (remember Vasco's “amico fragile”? One of the very few noteworthy Faber interpretations, relatives and big friends included) would be more awaited, and certainly more loved, than the imminent, and probably very predictable, album of “new” and “his” songs.

Tracklist

01   La Compagnia (05:12)

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