A feminine spoon river. But without pink quotas. Women who are an example, with their strength and their fragility. Floriana Cangiano, in art simply Flo, gives new life to figures that are full of contemporaneity. With the complicity of Michele Maione he called to himself, among others, Gabriella Ferri and the Queen of the Emigrants, the epic Gilda Mignonette, filling other people’s lives with meaning. A courageous, vibrant work, which on the fourth listen still gives new nuances. It is, Brave Girls, an album destined to remain, a work of research and poetry, a work of memory that should arrive in schools. Flo makes the wind of a summer afternoon epic, transforms the rain that only knows how to fall into life.
Floriana let’s start from the history of the album: when was it born and how did you work on it?
It was born many years ago as an idea, when they didn’t imagine that my stories in the form of notes could become a record. They imagined me one day doing an interpreter project. With the first lockdown an album had just come out and I said to myself: now what do I do? I took up my notes and with those women I started to spread. I worked on it remotely with Michele Maione, a collaboration on Skype that made us even closer.
Many moments of the album are autobiographical, in addition to being a songwriter you also had to investigate the soul and memories: was it difficult?
No, because writing and singing has been an everyday thing for me since I was a child, I am used to observing others. It was more difficult when I recorded as I was afraid of not feeling up to it; then I realized that things must be done without fear but with respect.
You say that when you write a song you already know how things went: do you ever want to change the ending, at least in your wishes?
Yes, you know how things went but today I understand that what happened six years ago I perceive it in a different way. Over time it takes on another meaning and becomes from sad to cheerful or from cheerful to melancholy.
How did you choose the four protagonists? I guess the list of names was long.
I started from human history to then tell something about that character that is unknown. I tell adventures: by Violeta Parra everyone knows Gracia a la Vida but few know that she spent on money, failing, to build a theater; the singer Gilda Mignonette was very famous in America, she never learned English, and died at sea returning home, she wanted to be buried in Naples and her tombstone are the geographical coordinates. I add that I have identified the songs that were more in my strings.
In everyday life you feel wild like Boccamara? She poisons with the bite and you with the words?
I am like that, I feel very wild. I live in the open air, I love nature, calm and tranquility. I live in Anzio. I am wild and instinctive, everything in me is immediate and sensational.
Would you really turn this world upside down?
To change things you have to observe them well, I would certainly slow down the course of things. Sometimes it helps to go slow. We are bombarded with the need to get things out, I do it because I’m not lazy but people demand the time to listen and take the memories home.
We are still slaves to a world dominated by venenos comentarios?
I still feel a little bad but not too bad. I have been doing this job for years and now I do not take it too much. I am touchy but if you criticize an idea it is okay, what I do not accept, and do not do, is to speak without knowing.
The day I left you, I was the one who won it is a cry of hope: where does the awareness that escape is redeeming arise?
In me! Because every time I ran away from something I then found something wonderful; I tell you that I ran away from a wedding a week before the wedding, I was 24 years old: I had realized that I could not have been a singer. Then I found something bigger, being alone with yourself opens the mind.
Did you find out how much the moon costs tonight?
No, however, the day I met this Magdalene in South America was dazzling: I was talking to a girl who sat waiting in a bar, then I realized she was there waiting for customers. He was a transvestite and this meeting touched me. One of your body does what it wants but if you are poor it is not always a choice.
How do you approach Violeta Parra?
I only listened to his version of the song so as not to be influenced. I tried to understand the feeling, those who have gone through major storms as happened to me know that these things make sense if the pains and griefs go through them, if you have not been free out of necessity. It’s a therapy and it comes, the audience feels it.
I think Gabriella Ferri often lacked the air of freedom: you?
No. Not today and I’m happy about it. I would like to be better known and work better but I have a moment in which I say no to everything that does not interest me. A little more notoriety would allow me important collaborations. But I’m lucky to be free, I have the life I wanted.
What has changed between Bocca di Rosa and yours malamaritate?
Unfortunately nothing, there is always a tendency to judge and point out those who make choices that we do not share. I’ve been there too. Of course today men are more sensitive, before we had to worry about being too feminist and being considered annoying. Today there is a different sensitivity, men have understood that it is not a war between male and female, but to get better, the frustrated woman is negativity for society and not just for the person next to her.
For more in Malamaritate you also touch on the issue of abuse by religious: it is a current and painful issue, how did you approach it? You used a great delicacy.
In Florence they told me about a shelter for prostitutes which today is the Teatro del Sale. Often these elderly women of life preferred to go back to the street than to be harassed by those who had to look after them. It’s a song from 2016.
If good girls go to heaven and bad girls go everywhere: which side are you on?
I’m among the good ones. I asked myself the question: for me being good is the courage to do something. The bad ones do nothing.
What will happen in the next few weeks? Can we hypothesize a second volume of good girls or one of bad ones?
If the covid does not stop us we have concerts: Milan, Naples, Modena and Rome are the first. In the meantime, I’m working on another project, I’m studying my notes and I’d like to finalize it for next winter. And I’ll stay in the world of good girls.
Source-tg24.sky.it