Davide Van De Sfroos, what is he doing? Does he reveal the dialect and does he also sing in Italian in his new album “Manoglia”, which means magnolia in laghée, after the “Yanez” experiment in Sanremo in 2011?
“I don’t want to hear the word traitor. When someone tells me to only use dialect, I start singing in Serbian and Thai. These texts were not born as songs, but as free sheet music. Being forced to speak the dialect would have been compulsive, a self-made prison. So some songs are in Italian, others are in dialect, others mix it up.
And considering that the dialect of your Lake Como is finally no longer marked by symbols of the Northern League, from which it has always distanced itself but which has persecuted it …
“There was a time when I thought I could have the freedom to meet all kinds of people. Then, on a whim, someone started thinking that I might belong to who knows what. It’s been about ten years since I started playing in the South and found an audience that understood me, that I don’t feel that steam, that smoke around me anymore. Now the distance to politics is unbridgeable.”
Let’s get back to the songs. How did “Manoglia” come about?
“It’s the classic album that risked never seeing the light of day. It was a collage of personal songs that were in the drawer and I would never have thought of letting them out. At some point I realized that there are no songs just for one person.
You have to buy a record: no streaming…
“Streaming platforms are increasingly geared towards supporting and promoting music from artists who play genres other than mine.” Also encouraged by the success of my friend Guccini’s album, I pursued the same strategy.”
You have often preferred portraits of characters, even when you stage them here, your gaze always starts with Davide…
“They are songs that emerged from notes I made in pencil in my notebooks while wandering between lakes and forests and traveling in my subconscious. In the studio we played freely and nuances emerged that I hadn’t imagined, also thanks to instruments that come from East or North Africa. There were only two rules: one that it would be an acoustic record and the other that it had to be heard in the fall, that season has the warmth and the colors.”
Two songs are musically twins: “La crisalide” and “El Giuvanonn”…
“A Pink Floyd idea, with all due respect.” The song is the same and the mood changes. In the first case, the gaze is directed from above and lets go; in the second are the roots and the memories.”
Does the root of the dialect resist?
“He is not dead. In the bars outside the tourist area of the lake you can still find people telling stories in dialect of hunting and fishing, of pain or full of irony. Many older people, but also some young people who work on construction sites or in the fields. My children understand it, but speak it less well: but I hear that one uses it in his trap experiments with friends.
Live he will combine the intimate atmospheres of this album with his folk party repertoire…
“We will be at the Arcimboldi on the day that does not exist, February 29th, and from there we will go through the theaters and create a mat that binds the two souls together.”