Michele Bravi: “I go on stage with a different emotional detachment”

«A piece born among others; it wasn’t meant for the Ariston stage. I started working on the new album by putting together ideas, melodies, songs left around, like scraps of fabric to be sewn together. From the beginning I imagined building a musical project that could be staged, as if it were a musical, songs supported by their show. I liked the idea that the project could also be transposed live.”

“Sooner or later”

From that creative chaos was also born the song that he is competing at the Sanremo Festival. “Prima o poi” was written together with Rondine, a very young singer-songwriter from Rome, and Gianmarco Grande. Alterisio Paoletti, on the other hand, is the one who “dressed the record” and who will conduct the orchestra on the Ariston stage. «With Paoletti we did an incredible job on the entire album. With Rondine, however, I found a rare connection. We are from two different generations but we had a great time. I let him browse through the ideas collected over the last few years. And it is precisely from there that we recovered the verse of the Sanremo song.”

“Sooner or later” tells of the feeling of loss and suffering you feel when a love story ends, between moments of profound sadness and that pinch of cynicism: «I’m happy to present it live. It allows me to give theatricality to the piece and living material to the story I’m telling. If I had put it on the radio it wouldn’t have been the same. During the performance on stage the orchestra will be as protagonist as I am: the piece has a difficult harmonic construction and the desire to describe the emotional range we feel in certain situations, where there is a big difference between the expectation of things and the clumsiness into which they transform.”

The duet with Fiorella Mannoia

Accompanying him on the evening of duets will be Fiorella Mannoia, of whom he was an accomplice in the Roman singer-songwriter’s latest album (“Tomorrow is Spring”, included in “Disobedire”). «I immediately thought of her because our performance will be a tribute to Ornella Vanoni with the song “Tomorrow is another day”. I will play her thinking about the great respect I had for her, while Fiorella will remember the friendship that bound her.” To complete this festival that Bravi defines as “family-run”, there will also be the actress and director Ilenia Pastorelli who is working on the video clip of the song: «Her gaze allowed me to focus on many things that I myself had not seen in that text».

The right weight to things

Michele Bravi says he returns to Ariston with a new serenity. «Today I learned to give the right weight to things. The Sanremo Festival is a great professional opportunity for which I want to prepare myself as best I can. But today I go on stage with a different emotional detachment than in the past. When I participated for the first time I remember that I cried all the time, I had impostor syndrome. Today I hope to have fun, to do things well and if I make mistakes it will be part of that clumsiness that, after all, I also sing about in my song.”