Antonio Pascuzzo and the responsibility of being a singer-songwriter

Lawyer and cultural agitator as well as musician, Antonio Pascuzzo he is that type of singer-songwriter who claims responsibility for this role: music is commitment and every word must be weighed. In the new “Pascouche canvas” – his third album, after “Rossoantico” (2010) and “Pascouche” (2015), both finalists at the Targhe Tenco – weaves a microcosm where folk, songwriting and a certain existential irony intertwine, with the hand of Mannarino and of many friends who enhance the collective dimension of art.

Antonio, what was the spark that gave birth to the album?

Maybe the spark only concerns the moment of publication, in reality I always write. I’ve always had this activity, I’ve been playing since I was a kid, when I played my idols’ songs. Then I started writing at university, mostly out of a competitive spirit, because I had someone at home who wrote some really terrifying songs and I thought: it can’t be that easy to write songs. A bit of a joke, but that’s how it all started. The album instead started from a lot of stuff collected over the years. I hadn’t published anything in ten years. Maybe I also did it to come out of my shell a bit, because in recent years – between Covid and other things – I had distanced myself a bit.

Is this a snapshot of what you look like now?

Yes, certainly. It represents me a lot, because it’s an album in which I also came to terms with my age. It’s one thing to sing at thirty, it’s another to sing at fifty-eight, even from a physical as well as emotional point of view. It’s a fairly unusual type of situation and almost sometimes you have to justify yourself a little to shield yourself, right? This is why I don’t show myself much. I mean, I use social media, I use the things that everyone uses to promote themselves, but I don’t go out and say that I made songs.

If you had to give coordinates to identify yourself to those who don’t know you, which authors would you cite?

This is flattery, I risk becoming a mythomaniac. I limit myself to having references, comets, but so distant and unattainable that I’m ashamed to even say them. I trained with the music of the best, the greatest in Italy, like Pino Daniele, Fabrizio De Andrè, that music. But more than getting closer to some of them, I like getting closer to the method: I studied these people, I studied their videos, I was also lucky enough to know them, and there was always a lot of work, a lot of study behind it. Certainly, compared to what music is today, it seems excessive, perhaps it had a different value even when they did it, but for me that’s playing. The research in the music, in the arrangement, even in the reference, hiding gems among the tracks, for those who perhaps have followed the same steps as me.

There are great masters but there are also friends, like Mannarino.

Yes, they are regulars who normally live in my life. People I meet and discuss very often. I listen to many of Alessandro’s works and those of many others in the process of being worked on, drafts, etc. Alessandro made many inroads in this latest album of mine. It’s family. At night, when he couldn’t sleep, he would knock and I would find him at my house: he would come to let me hear what he had written and to start writing together. In addition to the album, I also have many memories, videos that we made while we wrote and rewrote verses. It was profitable. He has the shots of a champion: every now and then he came up with things that I couldn’t ignore. For example, the chorus of “Capra” was a special gift: I was recording in the studio, then someone calls me and I’m forced to run away; he stays in the studio, working on my piece, and after a while he sends me what he wrote, which then became the chorus of the song. There is a special closeness.

One of the album’s strong points is the arrangement. How did you work with Alessandro Chimienti?

In a very, very, very natural way. Alessandro – who has always played with Mannarino – is a friend. We have a small format, a weekly appointment that we have had since 2016 or 2017: we meet at home, and then, since we are all musicians, we play, we play with the songs. Once we remade the songs of a Sanremo Festival, or, I don’t know, we did the soundtrack of “Narcos” live. On those occasions, it often happened that I had just written something and was dying to make it heard. The first of all was the one called “Cavalli” on the album: the next day, Alessandro sent me his version, and so it all began, very naturally. I have always thought that he had great attention, an ability to study, to research, which is also a great culture as well as technical ability. He had never done it before and it was a challenge that I wanted from the beginning, because I also like to do a bit of talent scouting, when I can.

Sometimes there is contrast between music and lyrics, as in “Rosa”. You use lightness to deal with complex topics.

That was exactly my intention. I didn’t want something that was just heartbreaking. Only Chaplin made Hitler a comical, grotesque character. The politicians of the present are by nature, there is no need for an artist to turn Lollobrigida into a comedian, so to speak. What do you want to do with someone who stops the train at Ciampino? Returning to the past, the grotesque, the use of this contrast is an element that I strongly wanted. I wondered a lot about what direction the piece should take. On the one hand there is a farcical part, in which I describe the characters as they do their thing, on the other there is the pretext from which the song was born, that is, the dedication to Rosa Maria Dell’Aria (an Italian teacher who explained to her students what platform 21 was, pilloried on social media and suspended, ed.).

You come out with an album of popular, folk, jazz and singer-songwriter music in a present that favors – at least in the charts – something completely different.

It’s definitely a statement of resistance. The first in the rankings today are arrested for armed gang and mistreatment of their companions. The first of the world pyramid is Trump. Well, I don’t care about becoming first. I may be a boomer, but when I think of my idols, Pino Daniele, Guccini, De Andrè etc., I think of people I respected beyond music. People also had an ethic of being a songwriter, they knew there was a responsibility to being a character. Today they don’t have it. Even those who do so-called “serious” things don’t have it. In our category there are all not very serious people. I make the music I like, just as there are still those who make classical music. I’m sorry that the spaces and the attention that the public gives to music are no longer what they used to be. But the music I make serves first and foremost to console me.

Do you feel more like a guardian of a tradition (that of songwriting) or an experimenter who tries to bring it to other territories?

No, caretaker definitely not. I don’t even know if I’m part of that tradition. I think I’m a singer-songwriter in the most correct sense of the term. Today it is used in an almost descriptive way: someone who writes their own songs. It’s not like that. The singer-songwriter was a definition on the basis of which a whole movement was born which referred precisely to that ethic, to that commitment, to the fact that songs shouldn’t talk about anything. There is a meaning behind the words that are used, but also first of all behind the word singer-songwriter, at the center of the debate that then gave life to Club Tenco. I am not a custodian nor even a continuer, but I feel like I belong to the category of those who try to make sense of what they write and how they experience what they do.

Compared to “liquid” music, you still care about the physical presence of musicians, live shows, improvisation in the studio.

Yes, basically music is an excuse. For me the essential thing about life is that I am a social being. I do everything I can in a collective, shared way. My mother remembers of me a phrase that I always said as a child, at five years old, when I looked out from the balcony railings to call those who were playing outside: “Friends, everyone come home”. For twelve years I had a venue that was just all of this, where I was lucky enough to be able to host some of the best musicians, the ones I loved the most, and I then continued this activity either by playing or organizing festivals. What I do is all aimed at satiating this desire. For me Eden is a place where there are songs, instruments and a lot of people who don’t hurt anyone.

What makes you proud when you think about your “Canvas”?

It’s not that I wouldn’t mind if the release of the album was accompanied by press releases on the unified network, eh, but… in reality it’s precisely this absence on the scene. I’m not a famous person, so I like to meet a lot of people when I go out with a record. Like all artists, I think I still like to give the best of myself, so I would say that being satisfied with the songs I make is already something that makes me quite satisfied. At least the people I know through them don’t know my worst parts, and that helps.