| Chanson |
Giovanni Battaglino has already had a long musical career, and since 2015, he has been working on his own “solo” project with original and traditional songs, entitled Canzoni dell’eroe quotidiano (Songs of the Everyday Hero), with which he went on tour in Tuscany in 2018.
In spring 2018, he began work on what would become his first solo album, Alla Porta dei Sogni (At the Door of Dreams), which was released in May 2019 on the historic Roman label AlfaMusic and distributed by Egea music. The album was presented in June at the Jazzit Fest in Pompei (Na).
Giovanni Battaglino is as passionate about words as he is about the guitar. These two things led him to produce this magnificent album, which consists of 10 songs, almost all written during the pandemic. Day by day, filling his notebook with vowels and consonances, with music in his head, he created this work, written by Battaglino himself in a notebook that accompanied him on this journey, filled with encounters with musicians, writers, and project collaborators.
Some titles are directly related to the theme of the album title (Starting Over with Words) such as “Ricominci”, “Dire”, “Strada per dove vorrai/ Route to Where You Want”, “Il peso delle cose/ The Weight of Things”, and others talk about direct or indirect encounters, such as “Isola pedonale/ Pedestrian Island”, “Il signore dei labirinti/ “The Lord of Labyrinths”, “Valzer per uno spirito/ “Waltz for a Spirit”, “Mancato amore/ “Missing Love”, and one, “La giostra/ The Carousel”, is about war, which has dangerously become relevant again.
This is the whole art of Italian song with lyrics resonating in this album, with simple melodies that almost make it a variety album, but with well-placed arrangements and voice that bring us back to the right path of opening our respective minds to this art form. The album includes the single “Non ho occhi/ I have no eyes” (AlfaMusic 2022), a song project on the theme of blindness, carried out with the Turin section of the Italian Union of the Blind and Visually Impaired.
We were easily carried away in this album with themes of joy, nostalgia, love… And we returned to it many times, an intelligent album that does us good, it’s so rare these days… Italy is so close to us in many ways, a country that is a true open-air museum, with thousands of church towers, producing the most beautiful olive trees and radiating grace, saw the birth of this excellent artist in its boot, who we hope will also seduce you. The Bayou Blue Radio and Paris-Move editorial teams attribute the “indispensable” label to this album.
Thierry Docmac
Correspondent in USA
Bayou Blue News – Bayou Blue Radio – Paris-Move
PARIS-MOVE, February 7th 2023
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