Canzoni (Fabrizio De André album)

Track listing

1. Via della Povertà - 9:37
2. Le passanti - 3:51
3. Fila la lana - - 2:40
4. La ballata dell'amore cieco - 3:05
5. Suzanne - 3:26

1. Morire per delle idee - 4:26
2. La canzone dell'amore perduto - 3:21
3. La città vecchia - 3:23
4. Giovanna d'Arco - 4:50
5. Delitto di paese - 3:55
6. Valzer per un amore - 3:37

   The songs

• Lyrically co-written by De André with his colleague and friend Francesco De Gregori at the very start of a collaboration which will produce the bulk of De André's next album Volume 8, "Via della Povertà" is a faithful translation of Bob Dylan's lengthy 1965 folk rock ballad "Desolation Row", originally featured on Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited. It is a complex and meticulous examination of various people in various states of despondency by an omniscient, external narrator. In the last verse, the narrator speaks directly to another person, stating that the whole content of the song is part of a letter he received from that person, and reminding them that the people described up to then are neither monsters nor heroes, but ordinary people. The final lines reveal the sender of the letter as someone who also lives on "Poverty Way".

  Alternate lyrics

• "Le passanti" , a translation of a Georges Brassens original from 1962, is dedicated by the singer "to every woman thought of as a lover", and, consequently, to all women. He goes on to describe some of them, living unremarkable lives, and melancholically concludes that he will find solace from his moments of solitude through his memories of "all the beautiful passers-by didn't manage to hold on to".
• "Fila la lana" , although superficially presented as a traditional ballad from the Middle Ages, is actually a 1948 composition by French songwriter Robert Marcy. It is about knights and warriors returning from a war, except for a Seignor who was killed and left his woman behind. In the chorus, she is described as endlessly spinning her wool, waiting for a homecoming which will never happen.
• "La ballata dell'amore cieco " includes one of De André's darkest lyrics ever, freely based on a poem by Jean Richepin. It tells the story of an honest man who falls madly in love with a vain woman "who didn't love him at all". She urges him to bring her his mother's heart "to feed dogs"; he duly complies by killing his mother and gruesomely ripping out her heart. Afterwards, the woman asks the man to slash the four veins in his wrists, effectively killing himself. Hypnotized by a mindless love, he does just that. At the end of the song, the woman is upset when she sees him dying happily and still in love, while realizing that she obtained nothing at all from him: neither love, nor affection, "but just the dried blood from his veins." The extremely dark, macabre mood of the lyrics is offset by the music, based on a jaunty Dixieland arrangement, which turns the entire piece into a musical tragicomedy.
• "Suzanne", De André's translation of a 1966 song by Leonard Cohen, originally written as a poem and later released on Cohen's Songs of Leonard Cohen album, is about a love affair between a young man and a travelling woman. The song also includes a passing mention of Jesus, described as a sailor who speaks to drowned people ; the couple imagines Jesus watching them "from his wooden tower" and blessing them.
• "Morire per delle idee" , another song translated by De André from a Brassens original, is a satirical, skeptical song about the so-called "martyrs for ideals", which De André has frequently met during his lifetime. He bitingly remarks that dying for ideals "okay, but dying a slow death" is useless, because all ideals are short-lived and meant not to be remembered at all by the posterity.
• "La canzone dell'amore perduto" features a sweet, nostalgia-laden arrangement based on a flugelhorn melody over an orchestral backing, and a subdued lyric exploring a recurring theme of De André's: his denial of the romantic notion that love is eternal. Indeed, he compares a love affair to withering flowers, stating that even the strongest and most passionate love relationship is going to die just like flowers; the person that the song is addressed to, though, is also described as very likely to restart everything as soon as they meet someone new. The song was covered by Franco Battiato on his 1999 album Fleurs, with a simplified arrangement based exclusively on strings.
• "La città vecchia" , a mazurka originally recorded by De André in 1965 for Karim, is set in the old part of Genoa, where he spent his teenage years, and depicts its narrow alleyways - traditionally home to prostitutes, drunkards, criminals and other marginalized people. Taking the first two lines almost directly from a poem by Jacques Prévert, the singer mentions a relationship between an "old professor" and a prostitute, stating that he is going to waste most of his hard-earned pension on her; he also warns him not to look down on her and the other people in the "old town", as they, in spite of how low and filthy their moral status may be, are all "children victims of this world."
• "Giovanna d'Arco", De André's adaption of a Cohen original from 1971, depicts the legendary French heroine while she burns at the stake; she talks to the fire and lets herself be consumed by it, as she is "tired of the war" and longing to wear "a wedding dress, or something white". Each of the four verses in the song ends with a "la-la-la" refrain.
• "Delitto di paese" , the third and last Brassens adaption within this album, is a neutral account of a murder occurring in a small town: an aged man falls in love with a much younger girl, but she and an acccomplice of hers murder him after finding out that he is "flat broke". They also search the victim's apartment, looking for money, but they find nothing else than "bills and court judgements." At the end, the narrator loses his detachment to describe the perpetrators earning a place in Heaven by crying over the dead body; upon being sentenced to death and hanged, they do ascend to Heaven - much to the chagrin of "some bigots".
• "Valzer per un amore", De André's vocal remake of "Valzer campestre", originally recorded in 1964 for Karim, features yet another melancholy-imbued lyric about the fickleness of love: the singer says that all manifestations of love from a man to a woman, such as hugs, kisses, caresses and love songs, will mean nothing and will end up as completely forgettable when she will be very old and he will have been dead for a long time. De André's lyrical approach on this song was influenced by a 16th-century sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, entitled Quand vous serez bien vieille . The sonnet's first verse is as follows: