Alice and the great songs of Franco Battiato
Alice of herself she said: “I’m a country girl. And I still like being one. The rest came later”. Today the musician born in Forlì who is registered at the registry office as Carla Bissi turns 70. For her birthday she gave herself a present the autobiography ‘The only way out is within’released in recent days. We celebrate her with the review of her latest album, “You were with me”released in 2022, a record of interpretations of songs by his mentor Frank Battiato.
She was his muse and female alter-ego for a lifetime. This time Alice becomes – the words are hers – “an instrument of Battiato’s music and of what he transmitted”. What it means exactly to become an instrument of the Sicilian singer-songwriter’s music can be understood by listening to the songs from “Eri con me”, the album that the voice of “Per Elisa” dedicated to her maestro, an expression that Battiato detested but which lends itself well to summarizing the relationship that existed between the two, a year and a half after his death: it is as if the singer’s interpretations were animated by the spirit of Battiato himself, from some dimension unknown to us.
The suggestion is more or less the same as that aroused by the concerts of the tour that for several months now has seen Alice reinterpret Battiato’s songs live together with the pianist Carlo Guaitoli and the orchestra of the Solisti Filarmonici Italiani, of which this album is in some way the “child” and of which it represents a sort of transposition into the studio.
Except that unlike the concerts, which see Alice sing by popular demand also songs so to speak “pop” from Battiato’s repertoire and linked to the successful partnership between the two from the 80s, see the same “Per Elisa” but also “Messaggio” and “Il vento caldo dell’estate”, here there is a precise thread that links the chosen pieces together: the spirituality sung over the years by the singer-songwriter, who in the lyrics alluded to Tibetan Buddhism, but also to the apocryphal gospels, in songs such as “Da Oriente a Occidente”, “Lode all’inviolato”, “Eri con me”, “E ti vengo a cerca”, “La cura”, “L’addio”, “Il re del mondo”, “Sui giardini della preesistente” and “Torneremo ancora”.
The album, which takes its title from the song Battiato wrote in 2012 with Manlio Sgalambro for Alice’s album “Samsara”, makes the singer a medium, in the true sense of the word: she is the intermediary through which the words and music of the Sicilian singer-songwriter, born from divine mechanics and become popular sentiment, come back to life in their purest form. Confirming how certain lyrics by Battiato were prophetic in their being universal, eternal. Like in “Io chi sono?”: “Since time immemorial / here you learn nothing / always the same mistakes / inevitably the same mistakes”. Everyone can sing Battiato, but no one can do it like Alice does.
