Carmen Consoli wanted to be (and is) a rockstar
“I wanted to be a rock star but I went to the Ursuline, and I dreamed of the stage while we were having a snack. It wasn’t success, but the stage, the lights and a real guitar and then, who knows why, I thought that to be a rock star you had to make huge bubbles with pink gum and that in America the gum was even bigger”. Thus he spoke Carmen Consoli of his latest album “I wanted to be a rock star” released in September 2021. Today the Sicilian musician turns 50 and, while waiting to hear her new songs, we celebrate her with our review of the ninth studio album of her career.
“Volevo fare la rockstar” is a complex album, but at the same time direct and without filters. Carmen Consoli (read our interview here) tells her story, the dreams that have fueled her and that she continues to put first compared to the “career soul”, but also the fears and anxieties that the planet is increasingly turning into a jungle. She does so, after a six-year break from “L’esperienza di ritorno”, with the voice of a woman, an artist, a mother. And just like the great singer-songwriters who have left indelible marks on the history of music, in addition to telling her own personal dimension, she also manages to photograph the time: that of feuds and Cosa Nostra, in those tumultuous 80s in which she grew up, and also the contemporary, among deniers and extremists without empathy.
It starts from its small size and breaks through into the collective narrative of the feelings and history of this country.
The title track is a clear example of this. “Armonie numeriche” is dedicated to her father who returns to recommend “commitment and coherence”, while “Le cose di sempre” is a letter to her son Carlo in which the artist explains the value of things, the respect due to others and to nature, values that are difficult to embrace in a society that appears to be disintegrated. There is the civil indignation of an “angry democrat”, punctuated with the irony of the song “Mago magone”, but also the fear of the return of a new darkness as in “L’uomo nero”: Consoli, in ten songs, retraces her history and arrives up to today, denouncing the attacks on freedom that we witness every day. It is a multi-layered album, full of life and political, in the highest sense of the term.
From a musical point of view, the writing of the project is particularly varied, full of different ideas and suggestions that have their roots in a refined rock. The harmonies are complex, often have long spaces of expression in which Massimo Roccaforte’s electric guitars move freely. The sound is clean and effective thanks also to the 12-string Rickenbacker that, combined with the acoustic guitar of the Sicilian singer-songwriter, gives a sound planet with echoes of the past, but at the same time modern. A sound balanced in time that reinforces the weight of the words. The bass riffs of “Sta succedendo”, the surf sound in “Mago magone”, the 1930s bolero and the 1950s orchestras full of woodwinds and small instruments in “Le cose di sempre”, the Caribbean sounds of “Armonie numeriche”, the references to the Beatles, REM and the Pixies, make the album thick and powerful.
Consoli musically evokes several decades, takes up the indomitable roots of her Catania rock, compared to Seattle in the 90s, and blends everything into a recognizable personal mix, the one that led her to be a leading figure in Italian music. The album shows an absolute attention to detail that starts from the cover, passes through the chosen photos and arrives at the interlocking of the words and the melodies. It is one of the most consistent and pregnant projects that the artist has ever churned out, an album of precise snapshots that do not have the fallacious ambition of climbing the charts, but of being listened to and remaining over time, giving the right weight to the coherence of the words.
