Fabrizio De André is an album released by Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André, released in 1981. The songs were written by Fabrizio De André and Massimo Bubola. It is also known as L'Indiano due to the picture of a Native Americanon the cover. The picture is a painting by Frederic Remington named The Outlier. The title of the painting and its author are not credited on the cover – neither in the original pressing nor in any of the subsequent reprints of the album on CD or vinyl.
Track listing
Side A
"Quello che non-ho" – 5:51
"Canto del servo pastore" – 3:13
"Fiume Sand Creek" – 5:37
"Ave Maria" – 5:30
Side B
"Hotel Supramonte" – 4:32
"Franziska" – 5:30
"Se ti tagliassero a pezzetti" – 5:00
"Verdi pascoli" – 5:18
Overview and songs
The album is a comparison of two apparently distant but nonetheless similar peoples who have both gone through colonization, the Sardinians and the Native Americans. It opens with the sounds of gunshots and people shouting from a bison hunting party, recorded in Sardinia especially for the album but intended to represent a hunting scene by Native Americans. These sounds also reappear in other sections through the album. Also, the songs "Fiume Sand Creek", "Hotel Supramonte" and "Franziska" start with piano/keyboards introductions, musically unrelated to the songs themselves.
"Quello che non-ho" is an ironical blues song, where De André describes himself as lacking the possessions, benefits and advantages typically associated with wealthy people or upper classes in general.
"Canto del servo pastore" is a gentle, moderately-paced ballad about a shepherd's idyllic lifestyle.
"Ave Maria", a folk song from Sardinia based on a version of the Hail Mary prayer in the local language, was sung in a choral multi-tracked style by Connecticut-born keyboardist Mark Harris providing the higher vocals, and De André providing the lower ones. According to Harris's recollections within "L'anarchia" , the seventh DVD in the 2011 documentary seriesDentro Faber about De André's life and work, the song was supposed to be sung by a group of tenores, a Sardinian polyphonic male choir, and Harris recorded a demo with his own voice to teach the song to the choir. However, when De André heard the demo, he was impressed by Harris's performance and told him: "Fuck it all, just sing this by yourself," also adding that he loved Harris's voice when it was strained. The final recording, with an instrumental arrangement inspired by Pink Floyd, does indeed feature Harris's full-throated singing from the demo, which he jokingly referred to as "a highly unlikely vocal performance by an American singing a Sardinian song in Sardinian." Harris also explained that, although he is not really a Pink Floyd fan, he does own a copy of Meddle, and that he played it for De André during the sessions, in response to the latter's request to find unusual, weird sounds.
"Hotel Supramonte" refers to the kidnapping of De André and Dori Ghezzi in 1979 in the Supramonte area of Sardinia. As with other songs concerned with personal matters, De André's lyrics are not a direct account of the event or of its circumstances, but instead a metaphorically idealized, poetic vision of it through his own eyes. The singer addresses a woman and invites her to spend some time with him at the "Supramonte Hotel", in an attempt to regain some feelings of love – which he laments she has lost. De André sings the whole lyric in a sweet, quiet style, without any traces of sadness or – for that matter – of anger.
"Franziska" is a Latin American-flavored song, set as a fast rumba at 130 BPM. The lyrics are about a Spanish girl, a penniless unlucky suitor of hers and a painter who, although nearly blind, is madly in love with her and morbidly jealous of everyone else.
"Se ti tagliassero a pezzetti" is, unusually for De André, a straightforwardly sentimental love song, addressing a nameless and possibly imaginary woman. The title, inspired by Nick Mason's tongue-in-cheek vocal phrase on Pink Floyd's "One of These Days", also from Meddle, is not meant to be understood literally, but just as ironically as Mason's utterance in Pink Floyd's experimental track. Indeed, the first two lines in De André's song are as follows: "If somebody cut you into little pieces / The wind would pick them all up and gather them." In one line, De André refers to himself as "Me, a guitar player; me, a violin player"; although the word "violin" was mainly chosen for rhyming purposes, De André did actually play both violin and guitar in his youth, starting on the former and then switching to the latter, and his son Cristiano is equally proficient on both.
"Verdi pascoli" is a joyous, quasi-reggae song, including prominent keyboards, backing vocals and a short drum solo. Its lyrics, inspired by a book on Native American culture De André was reading at the time, are about a very stylized and non-religious representation of a happy afterlife, closer to Summerland than to the Christian vision of Heaven.
Personnel
The musicians playing on the album were all hand-picked by Mark Harris, who also took care of the arrangements. The line-up features, among others, top Italian session men such as Gabriele "Lele" Melotti, Pier Michelatti, Aldo Banfi and Massimo Luca, as well as De Andrè's wife Dori Ghezzi and co-producer Oscar Prudente on backing vocals.
Fabrizio De André – Acoustic guitar in "Franziska" and "Hotel Supramonte", lead and backing vocals.
