Bersani: “I’m pleased that my songs do good”

“Awards are always nice even though they are not my aim. I don’t do my job to receive an award”, Samuele Bersani tells Rockol in the backstage of the Ariston Theater in Sanremo, where he is the protagonist of the third and final evening of Tenco 2024 for collect the Tenco Prize, awarded to the career of those who have made a significant contribution to Songwriting. He adds:

“Sometimes I happen to be surprised, on the street, by people I’ve never met, not even by sight, and who stop me – even with a bit of shyness – to tell me that I’ve done them some good with my songs, that maybe at a certain moment I kept him company. And this is the thing that continues to please me the most.”

The first time at Tenco for Bersani was as a guest in 1991, when, just twenty-one years old, without yet any record release, he was invited to present the song “Il monster”. Since then, the relationship with the festival dedicated to songwriting has intensified, winning five Tenco Plaques, the last for the album “Cinema Samuele”, up to this year’s Award. “I am very attached to this event”, explains Bersani: “At 21 years old I found myself here: it was the first time that someone invited me to a competition, to a music festival, when I hadn’t yet released a record “. He continues: “After 33 years, of course, I have a different perspective, but not even that much, because some things change a lot, while others – perhaps sometimes out of the blue – remain the same.”

At what point in Samuele Bersani’s career does the Tenco Award arrive? What awareness or security do you feel you have achieved? “I have never acquired any security, because as you become an adult, in my opinion you lose the security, those few securities you have as a teenager. Precisely because as I have grown up, frankly, there are more things that I seem to have unlearned. There are more doubts that I have. It seems a bit strange, but it’s true. I ask myself more questions today than when I was a boy. Now I’m forced to talk because I get asked questions. Now I have become a listener and sometimes too silent.”

On the occasion of the highest career recognition awarded by Club Tenco, Samuele Bersani presented live on the Ariston stage some well-known pieces from his repertoire, such as “En e Xanax” and “Giudizi universali”, as well as a song that was not usual include in the setlists of his concerts so far, “Albanian Barcarola”.

As a surprise encore, the singer-songwriter then decided to play “The Monster” on the piano. “When I wrote “The Monster” I was 17 years old, Bersani tells the audience at Tenco: “Then I went around to listen to the song, including Gino Paoli, who considered it ‘immature’. At the end of a concert, the ‘I then played it to Lucio Dalla. When the song ended, he was in tears. So he decided to help me.”

On the sidelines of an interview given to present “Cinema Samuele”, Bersani said a few years ago: “I probably fed more on cinema than on songs, and I have always loved listening to songs that sound like scenes from a film.

In this Dalla was very important for me”. Thinking back now on that phrase, on Dalla’s teachings and on the songs as stories, Bersani states: “It is true that Lucio Dalla was important for me also for this reason, because most of his The songs were not only profound but also very bizarre. They had such a vast imagination that was different every time. Like a director, like Stanley Kubrick, he tackled a different genre every time. Dalla did it with songs, with an imagination that I have rarely found in his other colleagues. C.with precision even in the story. With just a few words he had the ability to make you immerse yourself in the scene he wanted to tell. And there is a song called ‘Mary Louise’, which is not among his best-known songs, but for me it is precisely the cornerstone song of his repertoire, precisely because it has that strength there: it takes 4 or 5 characters, he puts everyone in a song, gives honor to the life of each of them, telling it with just a few things. All things that in the end lead you to see a film, that’s it.” He adds: “In addition to him, other great songwriters have also done it and the power of the song also lies in that, however much the sounds, methods and the durations”. He continues: “I wrote a record called ‘Cinema Samuele’, precisely because cinema has always been my first passion in the end. As much as my father is a musician and as much as I find myself making songs, perhaps I have a bit of a complex about not being a director, that’s it.”

After the Ariston stage for the Tenco Prize, Samuele Bersani will continue to tread the stages of Italian theaters for the new tour with the orchestra. “The tour sees me around with a 25-piece orchestra: it’s really a party to be surrounded by a type of sound that had never embraced me before on a stage, it was the sound of my childhood, because my father is a musician classical music”, explains the musician: “What I like is that every evening is never the same as the other, even if the songs are the same”.