Mina Week: “I can’t stop waiting for you”

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: LOVER’S GAS

I won’t stop waiting for you

Cover

Duration: 5:17

Author: Fabio Concato

This is a song about absence. About that emptiness that comes over you when you have no solutions, other than the desire to have someone who listens to you. You go your own way, you wait for someone to speak to you sooner or later, or rather to trust you, what you think. The problem is when there is no one to take charge of your destiny, to take care of it like a flower. In real life it’s not possible but in the forest of feelings and imagination you can invent the face you’re missing. Real people can take everything away from you, while invented ones, for fun or loneliness, complete you and never betray you. They are dangerously beautiful because they can last an entire lifetime.

I won’t stop waiting for you it was written by Fabio Concato. It has all of the introspective character of his characters, who don’t do somersaults or spin around but don’t stand still. If for the singer-songwriter the person to wait for is a she, for Mina it becomes a he. But neither one nor the other exists. They are like a hug of many moths in an endless night.

It is a ballad, which in Mina’s version features a persuasive jazz guitar solo by Luca Meneghello. Concato has a precise pace, but conveys a great nostalgia for what isn’t actually there. Mina, on the other hand, appears dramatic, painful. It even seems to break, moving like snow does on a slope in spring.

The first time he heard this version, Concato was astounded: «I listened to it again at least ten times in a row, in a crescendo of amazement at the total emotional adherence with which Mina gave voice (and what a voice…) to the loving yearning for an imaginary “him”, making his absence palpable. That same evening I was expected in Palinuro for a concert: I arrived there still half drunk from emotion, so much so that I don’t know how I managed to sing.”

«Maybe you don’t exist / And then I invent you / I imagine you and sing to you / And so, it seems to me that you are there / And if I can’t love so much / And make myself loved, I / What use would I be? It is the moment when Mina is most overwhelming, even if everything around her is suffused. What are we doing? What use are we if we cannot love and be loved?

It is important that this reflection is present in an album of doubts such as Lover’s gas (2024), one of the most beautiful records Mina has ever recorded. Beyond I won’t stop waiting for youother passages contain more or less the same questions, they revolve around our anxiety to give answers to almost insoluble mysteries. Love, and the relationships it sparks, is perhaps the most crucial of these. Concato, for his history and his talent, deserves the opening of the album, which sees in this game with oneself a perfect beginning.

I won’t stop waiting for you it is yet another of the many stormy crossroads that the singer has been able to cross with confidence.