Zita Swoon
A Song About A Girls

THE REVIEW

"Me And Josie On A Saturday Night"...

...I haven’t been able to listen to it since last summer, or I listened to it stubbornly distracted.

It slips away in my player and I have a sea of sensations surfacing in my stomach, rising, swelling, devastating with the last notes of the solo piano of this first track of the album. I listen to "A Song About A Girls". I am back at house number fifteen on any Avenue in my mind, returning after a few months guided by the hand by Stef who sings. Once again I'm alone and relaxed, at ease yet uneasy with an insular thought that is present and caring, with a vaguely guilty air. Two days have passed quickly. "It was warm and dark" (and I don't think De Gregori was referring to the 46-degree heat we have here today). And it was different from how I had imagined it (what strange thoughts sometimes in the mind... what irreparably unstable and unbalanced thoughts cut through Reason, at times, in some moments of life, leaving shreds of unconsciousness!).

"It's really hard to let you go..." track 3... I already have the sea at eye level. On the words of small anxiety and the confused rhythm of "Hey You, Whatshadoing?" intense sensations emerge with every listen, yet it's a simple and... delicately non-moving song. Yet, a word I detest and love. It explains a contradiction. It describes anger and the sense of absolute impotence. And it all started, more or less like this: "the nightmares in the dreams, the kisses in the wind...". All what? My submission to that sweetly scratched voice lamenting in a soothing rhythm. Soothing, yes, thinking that someone else must surely have felt what you feel... if they complain as well as you would, if they rejoice softly and composedly as you would, if they play moments of your own anger and tenderness, with chords of fury and abandonment, those inside you for never having learned to translate music with your hands. Like those of Stef, laden with melancholy and perfectly in tune with his voice that overcomes tears and warms. It was "Selfish Girl".

"Sad Water" was after an August storm passed over the Milan sky amid those two days. I thought fate had placed it there to spread slowly under his window just as I, with hard elbows, breathed out the strong smell of rainwater, sad water, needing to flow elsewhere...? and yet notes capable of washing away every thought leaving me only gratitude towards the Almighty for letting that noise last for just a short time, because I'm afraid of the rumble of storms!

"Josiesomething", then, always arrived like a sense of peace, a panacea for my restless forty-eight hours. Someone seemed to knock on the door of the room, someone who would talk to me... about a girl(s). From the piano introducing Stef, it must be about a radiant woman. And the tiny, plucked notes chasing his voice, his voice, his sweetly obsessive voice that disturbs and unsettles those who do not love the effeminate elf of agonizing feeling, Stef. Peace, not just the sense of it, never came again.

From that point on, captured and affected by a charming Stockholm Syndrome.

Mita