Mina Week: “She’s leaving home”
In the week of Mina’s birthday, we wish her a happy birthday by publishing five cards, one a day, taken from the book “Mina è” by Renato Tortarolo and Gabriele Sanlazzaro, published by Rizzoli (368 pages, 25 euros).
Album: KYRIE
She’s Leaving Home
Cover
Duration: 5:29
Authors: John Lennon, Paul McCartney
She prepared everything carefully: a piece of luggage and a letter. It’s still night. He is preparing to leave the house where he lived with his parents forever. It is dawn, however, when he takes to the streets. She finally feels free and is long gone when dad and mom discover the letter. It is the latter who finds her while she is putting on a dressing gown. While the law collapses and screams at her husband: our little girl is gone.
It starts like this She’s Leaving Homethe Beatles’ masterpiece. It’s 1967 and the song is part of the album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Mina will record it thirteen years later in Kyrie. It must be said right away that they are very different from each other. Lennon and McCartney’s original respects the silence of that morning that will change the lives of the entire family. It is a ballad in 3/4 supported at the beginning by a harp, then by the strings which form choruses and represent the point of view of the father and mother, the central moment of the story. Very difficult to approach.
Mina does it with care, interpreting all the roles: she describes the victorious escape of the girl and at the same time the demands of her parents. She was also accompanied by an orchestra with the addition of a piano. It is the male point of view, even if favorable to the girl, of a very widespread phenomenon at the time: abandoning a place that saw you grow but which also suffocated you. Mina is equally close to her, but further away than the two Beatles. On one thing they are similar, in describing with great realism the mother’s piqued and resentful reactions: we gave her everything, at least what money can buy, but where did we go wrong?
It’s a Friday and the girl begins to taste freedom by meeting the man she loves. She remembers all the times she felt alone and enjoys something that was always denied to her at home. Again: Mina observes a tragedy; Lennon and McCartney on the other hand are biased. For Mina, time expands because she knows very well – we are in 1980 – that even the universality of She’s Leaving Home must account for a different era. The phenomenon of suddenly leaving the family belonged to a set of protest phenomena, generally against institutions, which generated battles for sexual freedom, gender equality and self-determination. Ultimately: being able to choose a job, a career, a dignified and independent life.
When Mina sings She’s Leaving Homein Great Britain Margaret Thatcher is prime minister and, even if punk is waning, London Calling (1979) by the Clash is still the subversive anthem of those young people who found their first expression of freedom in escaping from oppressive families. Maybe there wouldn’t even be a valid reason to sing anymore She’s Leaving Home since the winds that inspired it no longer blow: the great dream, some prefer to call it utopia, of a better society at the end of the Sixties; the overwhelming revolution of arts and customs; and a youth participation that would become exemplary for subsequent generations.
Mina, on the other hand, brings everything back to the most human and minute dimension: that of the pain of this young woman, first, and of her parents, then. And it makes them incredibly close to us.
