I am not a person who has never been obsessively looking for a sound identity of his own, but if I think about it I realize that there is a music, a text, a song for every moment, for everything I do inside and outside my garden. . And as the latter is a kind of vegetable zoo, there is almost everything I want without worrying too much about the overall harmony (if I want a plant, I cry it!), With music it happens more or less the same what: I do not follow a fil Rouge that gives uniformity to the listening, but a series of sounds & words that make me feel good, each in its own way, each in a specific moment of my day in the field, in the greenhouse, in the vegetable garden or in the most wilderness of my piece of landscape. Or when I write, because I will always continue to do so, as I will never stop hoeing, pruning, multiplying, sowing. A Playlist without ‘fil rouge’, okay, but with a ‘rayon vert’ that connects everything, because even ‘my’ music always revolves (and only) around the love I have for my roommates, the plants. Here are the sounds I chose. Those who speak well would say that it is an eclectic style, but for me this is just a green zoo. Mine!
TALKING HEADS – [NOTHNG BUT] FLOWERS
The text tells a world in reverse (already at the end of the 80s …): men live in the Garden of Eden, but they are not ready for this downshift towards nature and they want consumerism and shopping malls back. Brilliant and hard, because true. The described paradise, full of love and life (but above all of flowers) is the garden in which I decided to live, where there is no lack of the tempting snake but not even the “two tools in love”.
ERIC CLAPTON – LET IT GROW
“Plant your love and let it grow”: nothing more therapeutic (and more ’70s …). In my garden overlooking the sea I plant love, not (only) vegetables. Cultivating, caring for living beings who do not speak but, in their own way, communicate is my cure. And it works! (Yes, I’m a plant-mama).
JOHN DENVER – THE GARDEN SONG
Don’t take me for crazy but… I love listening and above all seeing the video of this folk song for children from the 70s: it makes me happy (usually while I take care of the vegetable garden): everyone should have zinnias, foxgloves and singing vegetables.
FABRIZIO DE ANDRE ‘- VIA DEL CAMPO
Here, on the other hand, I can’t even smile and I hear the really powerful text: “Nothing comes from diamonds, flowers are born from manure”. How could I disagree?
LUCAS NELSON – TURN OFF THE NEWS (BUILD A GARDEN)
I can’t help being moved every time I listen to this song, tender and profound, because in the title there is my whole life: I have just “turned off” the news, leaving Repubblica, to live in a large isolated garden and look after it every day , surrounded by living beings (plants, animals and humans) that I love. This song makes me feel good anytime, anywhere. It reminds me of who I am and where I chose to go. In the end it seems a lot more difficult than it is (country life, I mean!).
FABRIZIO DE ANDRE ‘- CREUZA DE MÄ
Yes, again him, De André: after all I’m Ligurian (by adoption). At first it was like listening to a mantra, I didn’t need to understand the words: I felt welcomed, at home.
Then, with the help of Bruno (my 88-year-old neighbor) and 10 years of living in loco, I discovered that in the text there is also a flower, the carnation, and it seemed to me the most beautiful revelation.
Ps. from my house, then, you reach the sea (mä) just going down a creuza, the typical pedestrian street of earth and stones.
THE CURE – IN FOREST
Although I do not have a dark soul (or maybe yes?) This piece of gothic rock (they say so, right?) From the 80s reminds me that not everyone is as well and at peace as me when I am in the woods. There are also those who feel alone, the text tells it, albeit hermetic, despite the vegetation in which one is immersed, teeming with life.
This is why – perhaps – I like to tell stories of plants and flowers: to make people understand that in nature you are never alone …
TOM PETTY – HOUSE IN THE WOODS
Contained in the mid-90s album ‘Wild Flowers and All The Rest’, it is a rock song that I like to listen to for the lyrics: it tells the lifestyle I have chosen.
THE JOHN BUTLER TRIO – TREES
A voice and a guitar tell a message that is even more contemporary and urgent today, twenty years after its publication: ‘if we cut down all the trees there will be nothing more to see, nothing more to breathe’.
LUDOVICO EINAUDI – A MORNING
This album is the exception: the only one that doesn’t talk about plants, nature or flowers, but above all the only one that I listen to outside my Eden, to feel a little inside. It is a sound that calms me and brings me to a stage of very high concentration: I always put it on my headphones in the editorial office, when I was still a full time journalist: I could not write in the comings and goings of the open space without this accompaniment that estranged me from the place and people. It then became the only sound during the writing of my first novel “The grass runs when it wants: a country notebook of a city woman” (ed. Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, 2021). Why did I start by saying that I never researched my sonic identity? Maybe because now I have it.
Source-tg24.sky.it