Anime salve is the final album released by
Italiansinger/songwriterFabrizio De André in 1996. It was written together with fellow
GenoanIvano Fossati. In a 2011 interview within the DVD documentary series Dentro Faber [i.e. Inside Faber] about De André's life and works, Fossati stated that he and De André composed all the music for the album by actually playing together in the latter's country house in
Sardinia, working on almost-complete lyrics by De André, to which Fossati added a few lines.[2] He is featured as a guest singer on the title track and on "Â cúmba" (which features De André and Fossati respectively as "the suitor" and "the father"). Fossati also guested in some of De André's live shows from the era, where he was introduced by the latter as "a great guy with two huge defects: he's a friend of mine, and a
Sampdoria supporter."[3]
Track listing
"DISAMISTADE": graffiti in Turin
"Princesa" (4:52)
"Khorakhané" (5:32)
"Anime salve" (5:52)
"Dolcenera" (4:59)
"Le acciughe fanno il pallone" (4:47)
"Disamistade" (5:13)
"Â cúmba" (4:03)
"Ho visto Nina volare" (3:58)
"Smisurata preghiera" (7:08)
All songs written by Fabrizio De André and Ivano Fossati, except for the original Spanish lyrics to "Smisurata preghiera", written (as "Desmedida plegaria") by
Álvaro Mutis and Fabrizio De André.
Vinyl version
Anime salve was the only album in De André's discography not to have a vinyl edition when originally released - it was issued on
CD and
cassette. It was released on vinyl only in 2018, as the third-to-last issue of
Corriere della Sera and
De Agostini's Fabrizio De André Vinyl Collection, which includes all of De André's studio albums and all of the extant live recordings from his eight concert tours (many of which, although previously issued on CD as part of
Sony Music's 2012 box set I concerti, were also released on vinyl for the first time). Because of the physical space occupied by the various tracks on the two sides of the record, the tracklist on the vinyl version is different from the CD (as above):
Side A
"Princesa"
"Ho visto Nina volare"
"Anime salve"
"Dolcenera"
"Le acciughe fanno il pallone"
Side B
"Khorakhané"
"Â cúmba"
"Disamistade"
"Smisurata preghiera"
Overview
The album, released after six years of studies, shows marked influences of Latin-American music, as well as Eastern-European and Mediterranean ones (the latter deriving from the original project, which De André had begun with
Mauro Pagani). Most of the lyrics deal with the theme of solitude and diversity, often considered as a positive, free state of life: the Brazilian
transsexual immigrant ("Princesa"), the
Romani people ("Khorakhanè"), the poor
anchovy fisher ("Le acciughe fanno il pallone"), the man in love ("Dolcenera"). The title itself, though generally translated as "Saved souls", etymologically means "Solitary spirits".[citation needed]
Starting from late 1997, De André undertook an extensive tour of Italy to promote both this album and the later collection Mi innamoravo di tutto ["I used to fall in love with everything", a line from his 1978 song "Coda di Lupo"], which focused on his earlier work. The tour went on until 13 August 1998, when De André was forced to interrupt it because of his failing health.[citation needed] Two shows in the tour, held at
Teatro Brancaccio in
Rome on February 13 and 14, 1998, were filmed for
RAI and released on DVD in 2004, as Fabrizio De André in Concerto - the very last filmed testimony of his live activity.[citation needed]
The songs
"Princesa" ["Princess" in
Portuguese] is an
accordion-led folk song whose rhythm, halfway between a
milonga and a Portuguese
fado, is carried forward by De André's fast delivery of witty, pointed lyrics, which are partly based on, and feature a number of excerpts from, Brazilian transsexual model
Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque's 1995 autobiography (co-written with journalist and former
Red Brigades criminal Maurizio Jannelli), also titled "Princesa" after a nickname of hers. The song narrates her youth and her failed early attempts at
gender transitioning, then goes on to narrate a series of mostly true events. However, the last verse of the song features a "happy ending", with Princesa feeling contented about being in a stable relationship with a wealthy lawyer from
Milan, which does not match real life at all: Farias never fully completed her male-to-female transition, and committed suicide in 1999. After the last verse, the coda of the song features a long list of words in
Brazilian Portuguese, sung by a male/female choir (including two transsexuals) over a prominent Brazilian
percussion background, representing Princesa's childhood.
Subtitled "A forza di essere vento" ("By virtue of being wind"), "Khorakhané" is a soft, slow-paced song named after the
Muslim Romani people of
Bosnia and
Montenegro and consisting in a concise recapitulation of their history. It features a poetical ending sung by
Dori Ghezzi in a quasi-operatic style, whose lyrics, a metaphorical expression of a quest for freedom, were written by De André and translated into
Sinte Romani by Roma poet and writer Giorgio Bezzecchi, a friend of his.
"Anime salve", a duet with
Ivano Fossati which includes prominent
synths and a more contemporary-sounding arrangement in comparison to other
acoustic-oriented tracks on the album, is a thoughtful ballad about
solitude. Coming after two tracks whose protagonists experienced solitude as being imposed on them by external circumstances, Fossati meant this song to be a hymn to solitude as a choice that can save one's soul from the worst human failings, solitude as a counterbalance to living in the world, a solitude that gives space for better understanding, learning and reflection about the world, a solitude that counters the tendencies towards violence that result from people banding together and identifying as a group, both at the local/social level and at the level of political states.[4] De André's and Fossati's vocals complement each other throughout the track, finishing and continuing each other's vocal lines; although they never met each other during the recording of the album,[5] they did perform the song as a duet during the subsequent live tour.
"Dolcenera" [literally "Sweetblack" - referring to flooding water] is a musical counterpart to "Â duménega" from Crêuza de mä and "Don Raffaè" from Le nuvole: a sprung, slightly irregular but metrically clear
tarantella rhythm, punctuated by acoustic guitars and accordions. It is spatially and temporally set during the October 8, 1970 flood in Genoa, and its lyrics, freely based on newspaper accounts from the era, are about a man who is trying to organize a clandestine meeting with his mistress (a married woman); however, she gets stuck in a
tram carriage which is separated from the rest of the tram because of the flood, and the planned meeting never happens. The lyrics also feature lines sung in
Genoese dialect, which express the man's thoughts.
Apulian singer-songwriter
Dolcenera (a.k.a. Emanuela Trane) chose her stage name after this song; she and
Lucio Fabbri from
PFM, her first producer, were inspired by her moody looks - she dressed almost exclusively in black during her early career - and by the dark-sounding lyrics to her first compositions.
"Le acciughe fanno il pallone" ["The anchovies make a ball"] is a song about
fishermen, focusing on the hardships of their work. Its title derives from a phenomenon, often happening on the Ligurian coast, where anchovies, pursued by bluefish, run by the thousands toward the surface, and, in doing so, defend themselves by gathering up into a glittering ball.[6] The lyrics to the song are about another kind of solitude, due in this case to poverty. The hard-working fisherman is in competition with a tuna for the anchovies he fishes for, and faces an uncertain market demand onshore for his catch even then. He can only dream of catching a golden fish that would improve his circumstances and allow him to marry. Musically, the song is a moderately-paced
samba; the musical tag at the end, though, is a wonderful example of the multicultural influences on the album - a middle-Eastern
shehnai playing over an African-inspired bed of rhythm, along with a Cuban
tumbao in the bass.
"Disamistade", as the title says [literally "Unfriendship" in
Sardinian, but here intended as
feud], deals with a feud between two families in rural
Sardinia. De André describes them as having no real animosity between each other and desperately making attempts to reconcile, or maybe just to come to terms with the situation - even if they know that all of their attempts will eventually come to either a bloodshed or to nothing at all because of a century-old grudge, so strong and powerful that no-one is able to dissipate it. This is narrated by De André in a deliberately resigned style over a slow,
dirge-like march, marked by the metallic, almost ominous clangs of a Brazilian
berimbau, a
musical bow featuring a single metal string over an emptied gourd. The singer marks the end of every verse with nonsense words ('ndea-oh, 'ndea-oh), vaguely sounding like Sardinian but not belonging to that language. A faithful English-language cover of the song was released in 2000 by the American
indie folk band
The Walkabouts, who included it on their album Train Leaves at Eight.
The whole of "Â cúmba" (music and lyrics) is based on a traditional Genoese
call-and-response rhyme from the 1800s, and it is entirely sung in Genoese by De André (as "the father"), Fossati (as "the suitor") and a female choir, representing the townspeople. The lyrics are an excited dialogue between the two males, arguing over the elder man's daughter - the "cúmba" of the title, literally translatable as "the dove" and meant as a yet-unmarried girl.
"Ho visto Nina volare" ["I saw Nina flying"] is a sensitive, sweet ballad about a distant past. It is based on the recollections of Giovanna "Nina" Manfieri, a childhood friend of De André's who she first met in 1942, when both of them were two, and with whom she spent her entire childhood.[7] The lyrics, written from a child's point of view, are about the singer's longing to grow up and become independent from his elders, while simultaneously being fearful of the unknown.
"Smisurata preghiera" ["Limitless prayer"], the album closer, is built as a
sea shanty, but musically stronger than the usual examples of the genre. Its subject matter is, yet again, sailors - here described as a race of their own, proudly standing above a generalized, faceless "majority" and obstinately going their own way, against the tide of the mainstream culture; De André would include in this special "mix" all marginalized people - the poor, social outcasts, rebels of many stripes and, indeed, sailors. The song is inspired by and partly based on poems within short stories by
Álvaro Mutis - especially from his 1993 collection "
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll". (Mutis later became De André's friend.) The lines "for the one who travels in a stubborn and opposite direction, / with his special mark of special desperation" sum up the entire album's poetical stance, as well as much of De Andrè's work. The lyrics to the song were originally written in
Colombian Spanish by De André, who condensed several passages from poems by Mutis into a consistent whole; the singer also recorded a Colombian Spanish demo of the song, which was given to Mutis from De André as a gift and never officially released in full (an excerpt from it is featured in the second DVD in the Dentro Faber series).[8] He was taught the correct South American pronunciation by noted Italian-Argentinian film score composer
Luis Bacalov.[9] The lyrics to the album version are literally translated from the original Spanish lyrics. After De André finishes singing, the song concludes with a 90-second orchestral
coda in
free time, arranged by
Piero Milesi.
Personnel
The album features De André's full backing band from his live shows at the time, which includes
ethnic music specialist Mario Arcari,
guitarist Michele Ascolese and
drummerEllade Bandini, as well as his wife
Dori Ghezzi and their daughter Luvi De André on vocals.[10] Percussionist Giuseppe "Naco" Bonaccorso, who is also prominently featured, was tragically killed in a car accident in June 1996, shortly after completing his parts on the album.[11]
Dori Ghezzi, Luvi De André, Silvia Paggi, Beppe Gemelli, Robson R. Primo (Agata), Roberto Esteráo (Roberta) - Vocals (Note: the last two names in the list belong to Brazilian transsexuals.)
Neusinha Escorel, Patricia Figueredo, Rosa Emilia -
Spoken vocals
Naco -
Rake (i.e. hitting and scraping the metal teeth on a rake with a wooden stick), caxixi, djembé,
electrical wire gasket,
gong, conga and shaker (Note: An uncredited
vibraslap can also be heard among the other percussion instruments.)
Pier Michelatti - Bass guitar
Michele Ascolese - Classical guitar
Dori Ghezzi, Luvi De André, Silvia Paggi - Female vocals
^Told by Nina Manfieri in the third volume of the Dentro Faber DVD series, i.e. Le donne [Women].
^Dentro Faber DVD series, vol. 2: Gli Ultimi [The Lowest Ones].
^As shown in the 2004 In Concerto DVD, the singer dedicates the song to Bacalov, who is in the audience, and publicly thanks him for his vocal coaching.
Anime salve is the final album released by
Italiansinger/songwriterFabrizio De André in 1996. It was written together with fellow
GenoanIvano Fossati. In a 2011 interview within the DVD documentary series Dentro Faber [i.e. Inside Faber] about De André's life and works, Fossati stated that he and De André composed all the music for the album by actually playing together in the latter's country house in
Sardinia, working on almost-complete lyrics by De André, to which Fossati added a few lines.[2] He is featured as a guest singer on the title track and on "Â cúmba" (which features De André and Fossati respectively as "the suitor" and "the father"). Fossati also guested in some of De André's live shows from the era, where he was introduced by the latter as "a great guy with two huge defects: he's a friend of mine, and a
Sampdoria supporter."[3]
Track listing
"DISAMISTADE": graffiti in Turin
"Princesa" (4:52)
"Khorakhané" (5:32)
"Anime salve" (5:52)
"Dolcenera" (4:59)
"Le acciughe fanno il pallone" (4:47)
"Disamistade" (5:13)
"Â cúmba" (4:03)
"Ho visto Nina volare" (3:58)
"Smisurata preghiera" (7:08)
All songs written by Fabrizio De André and Ivano Fossati, except for the original Spanish lyrics to "Smisurata preghiera", written (as "Desmedida plegaria") by
Álvaro Mutis and Fabrizio De André.
Vinyl version
Anime salve was the only album in De André's discography not to have a vinyl edition when originally released - it was issued on
CD and
cassette. It was released on vinyl only in 2018, as the third-to-last issue of
Corriere della Sera and
De Agostini's Fabrizio De André Vinyl Collection, which includes all of De André's studio albums and all of the extant live recordings from his eight concert tours (many of which, although previously issued on CD as part of
Sony Music's 2012 box set I concerti, were also released on vinyl for the first time). Because of the physical space occupied by the various tracks on the two sides of the record, the tracklist on the vinyl version is different from the CD (as above):
Side A
"Princesa"
"Ho visto Nina volare"
"Anime salve"
"Dolcenera"
"Le acciughe fanno il pallone"
Side B
"Khorakhané"
"Â cúmba"
"Disamistade"
"Smisurata preghiera"
Overview
The album, released after six years of studies, shows marked influences of Latin-American music, as well as Eastern-European and Mediterranean ones (the latter deriving from the original project, which De André had begun with
Mauro Pagani). Most of the lyrics deal with the theme of solitude and diversity, often considered as a positive, free state of life: the Brazilian
transsexual immigrant ("Princesa"), the
Romani people ("Khorakhanè"), the poor
anchovy fisher ("Le acciughe fanno il pallone"), the man in love ("Dolcenera"). The title itself, though generally translated as "Saved souls", etymologically means "Solitary spirits".[citation needed]
Starting from late 1997, De André undertook an extensive tour of Italy to promote both this album and the later collection Mi innamoravo di tutto ["I used to fall in love with everything", a line from his 1978 song "Coda di Lupo"], which focused on his earlier work. The tour went on until 13 August 1998, when De André was forced to interrupt it because of his failing health.[citation needed] Two shows in the tour, held at
Teatro Brancaccio in
Rome on February 13 and 14, 1998, were filmed for
RAI and released on DVD in 2004, as Fabrizio De André in Concerto - the very last filmed testimony of his live activity.[citation needed]
The songs
"Princesa" ["Princess" in
Portuguese] is an
accordion-led folk song whose rhythm, halfway between a
milonga and a Portuguese
fado, is carried forward by De André's fast delivery of witty, pointed lyrics, which are partly based on, and feature a number of excerpts from, Brazilian transsexual model
Fernanda Farias de Albuquerque's 1995 autobiography (co-written with journalist and former
Red Brigades criminal Maurizio Jannelli), also titled "Princesa" after a nickname of hers. The song narrates her youth and her failed early attempts at
gender transitioning, then goes on to narrate a series of mostly true events. However, the last verse of the song features a "happy ending", with Princesa feeling contented about being in a stable relationship with a wealthy lawyer from
Milan, which does not match real life at all: Farias never fully completed her male-to-female transition, and committed suicide in 1999. After the last verse, the coda of the song features a long list of words in
Brazilian Portuguese, sung by a male/female choir (including two transsexuals) over a prominent Brazilian
percussion background, representing Princesa's childhood.
Subtitled "A forza di essere vento" ("By virtue of being wind"), "Khorakhané" is a soft, slow-paced song named after the
Muslim Romani people of
Bosnia and
Montenegro and consisting in a concise recapitulation of their history. It features a poetical ending sung by
Dori Ghezzi in a quasi-operatic style, whose lyrics, a metaphorical expression of a quest for freedom, were written by De André and translated into
Sinte Romani by Roma poet and writer Giorgio Bezzecchi, a friend of his.
"Anime salve", a duet with
Ivano Fossati which includes prominent
synths and a more contemporary-sounding arrangement in comparison to other
acoustic-oriented tracks on the album, is a thoughtful ballad about
solitude. Coming after two tracks whose protagonists experienced solitude as being imposed on them by external circumstances, Fossati meant this song to be a hymn to solitude as a choice that can save one's soul from the worst human failings, solitude as a counterbalance to living in the world, a solitude that gives space for better understanding, learning and reflection about the world, a solitude that counters the tendencies towards violence that result from people banding together and identifying as a group, both at the local/social level and at the level of political states.[4] De André's and Fossati's vocals complement each other throughout the track, finishing and continuing each other's vocal lines; although they never met each other during the recording of the album,[5] they did perform the song as a duet during the subsequent live tour.
"Dolcenera" [literally "Sweetblack" - referring to flooding water] is a musical counterpart to "Â duménega" from Crêuza de mä and "Don Raffaè" from Le nuvole: a sprung, slightly irregular but metrically clear
tarantella rhythm, punctuated by acoustic guitars and accordions. It is spatially and temporally set during the October 8, 1970 flood in Genoa, and its lyrics, freely based on newspaper accounts from the era, are about a man who is trying to organize a clandestine meeting with his mistress (a married woman); however, she gets stuck in a
tram carriage which is separated from the rest of the tram because of the flood, and the planned meeting never happens. The lyrics also feature lines sung in
Genoese dialect, which express the man's thoughts.
Apulian singer-songwriter
Dolcenera (a.k.a. Emanuela Trane) chose her stage name after this song; she and
Lucio Fabbri from
PFM, her first producer, were inspired by her moody looks - she dressed almost exclusively in black during her early career - and by the dark-sounding lyrics to her first compositions.
"Le acciughe fanno il pallone" ["The anchovies make a ball"] is a song about
fishermen, focusing on the hardships of their work. Its title derives from a phenomenon, often happening on the Ligurian coast, where anchovies, pursued by bluefish, run by the thousands toward the surface, and, in doing so, defend themselves by gathering up into a glittering ball.[6] The lyrics to the song are about another kind of solitude, due in this case to poverty. The hard-working fisherman is in competition with a tuna for the anchovies he fishes for, and faces an uncertain market demand onshore for his catch even then. He can only dream of catching a golden fish that would improve his circumstances and allow him to marry. Musically, the song is a moderately-paced
samba; the musical tag at the end, though, is a wonderful example of the multicultural influences on the album - a middle-Eastern
shehnai playing over an African-inspired bed of rhythm, along with a Cuban
tumbao in the bass.
"Disamistade", as the title says [literally "Unfriendship" in
Sardinian, but here intended as
feud], deals with a feud between two families in rural
Sardinia. De André describes them as having no real animosity between each other and desperately making attempts to reconcile, or maybe just to come to terms with the situation - even if they know that all of their attempts will eventually come to either a bloodshed or to nothing at all because of a century-old grudge, so strong and powerful that no-one is able to dissipate it. This is narrated by De André in a deliberately resigned style over a slow,
dirge-like march, marked by the metallic, almost ominous clangs of a Brazilian
berimbau, a
musical bow featuring a single metal string over an emptied gourd. The singer marks the end of every verse with nonsense words ('ndea-oh, 'ndea-oh), vaguely sounding like Sardinian but not belonging to that language. A faithful English-language cover of the song was released in 2000 by the American
indie folk band
The Walkabouts, who included it on their album Train Leaves at Eight.
The whole of "Â cúmba" (music and lyrics) is based on a traditional Genoese
call-and-response rhyme from the 1800s, and it is entirely sung in Genoese by De André (as "the father"), Fossati (as "the suitor") and a female choir, representing the townspeople. The lyrics are an excited dialogue between the two males, arguing over the elder man's daughter - the "cúmba" of the title, literally translatable as "the dove" and meant as a yet-unmarried girl.
"Ho visto Nina volare" ["I saw Nina flying"] is a sensitive, sweet ballad about a distant past. It is based on the recollections of Giovanna "Nina" Manfieri, a childhood friend of De André's who she first met in 1942, when both of them were two, and with whom she spent her entire childhood.[7] The lyrics, written from a child's point of view, are about the singer's longing to grow up and become independent from his elders, while simultaneously being fearful of the unknown.
"Smisurata preghiera" ["Limitless prayer"], the album closer, is built as a
sea shanty, but musically stronger than the usual examples of the genre. Its subject matter is, yet again, sailors - here described as a race of their own, proudly standing above a generalized, faceless "majority" and obstinately going their own way, against the tide of the mainstream culture; De André would include in this special "mix" all marginalized people - the poor, social outcasts, rebels of many stripes and, indeed, sailors. The song is inspired by and partly based on poems within short stories by
Álvaro Mutis - especially from his 1993 collection "
The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll". (Mutis later became De André's friend.) The lines "for the one who travels in a stubborn and opposite direction, / with his special mark of special desperation" sum up the entire album's poetical stance, as well as much of De Andrè's work. The lyrics to the song were originally written in
Colombian Spanish by De André, who condensed several passages from poems by Mutis into a consistent whole; the singer also recorded a Colombian Spanish demo of the song, which was given to Mutis from De André as a gift and never officially released in full (an excerpt from it is featured in the second DVD in the Dentro Faber series).[8] He was taught the correct South American pronunciation by noted Italian-Argentinian film score composer
Luis Bacalov.[9] The lyrics to the album version are literally translated from the original Spanish lyrics. After De André finishes singing, the song concludes with a 90-second orchestral
coda in
free time, arranged by
Piero Milesi.
Personnel
The album features De André's full backing band from his live shows at the time, which includes
ethnic music specialist Mario Arcari,
guitarist Michele Ascolese and
drummerEllade Bandini, as well as his wife
Dori Ghezzi and their daughter Luvi De André on vocals.[10] Percussionist Giuseppe "Naco" Bonaccorso, who is also prominently featured, was tragically killed in a car accident in June 1996, shortly after completing his parts on the album.[11]
Dori Ghezzi, Luvi De André, Silvia Paggi, Beppe Gemelli, Robson R. Primo (Agata), Roberto Esteráo (Roberta) - Vocals (Note: the last two names in the list belong to Brazilian transsexuals.)
Neusinha Escorel, Patricia Figueredo, Rosa Emilia -
Spoken vocals
Naco -
Rake (i.e. hitting and scraping the metal teeth on a rake with a wooden stick), caxixi, djembé,
electrical wire gasket,
gong, conga and shaker (Note: An uncredited
vibraslap can also be heard among the other percussion instruments.)
Pier Michelatti - Bass guitar
Michele Ascolese - Classical guitar
Dori Ghezzi, Luvi De André, Silvia Paggi - Female vocals
^Told by Nina Manfieri in the third volume of the Dentro Faber DVD series, i.e. Le donne [Women].
^Dentro Faber DVD series, vol. 2: Gli Ultimi [The Lowest Ones].
^As shown in the 2004 In Concerto DVD, the singer dedicates the song to Bacalov, who is in the audience, and publicly thanks him for his vocal coaching.