Did Tiziano Ferro need Elodie to return to “Xdono”?

After all, the combination isn’t even that bad. Tiziano Ferro and Elodie are two pop icons, in different ways, from different generations, linked together by that ability to credibly balance between pop and urban. Him he brought r&b into the Italian mainstream when together with Michele Canova, at the beginning of the 2000s, he began to reproduce in Italian the things he heard from the records of Timbaland, Erykah Badu, Aaliyah, Missy Elliot (at a certain point he even quotes them in the song), sometimes in a so philological as to border on plagiarism, as in the case of “Did you ever think” by R.

Kelly and “Xdono”. .She, however, has always flirted with the urban world, just think of the duets with Marracash, Gemitaiz, Fabri Fibra, Rkomi, Sottotono. It was inevitable that at some point their paths would cross and it happened with “Feeling”.

The collaboration came to fruition last September, when Elodie took a plane from Milan towards Los Angeles, where she joined Tiziano Ferro in the recording studio, with whom she also shot the video for “Feeling” on that occasion. AND never mind that the song, to be honest, is so and so, let’s say not quite up to expectations (as well as the video itself, in black and white to recall those of the American pop hits of the early 2000s, which between lingerie and various rubbings It looks like an advertisement for an underwear brand – it was directed by the Morelli Brothers, from Bari and based in Los Angeles, where they work mainly in the fashion field and have immortalized Emily Ratajkowski, Irina Shayk, the Kardashian sisters): the duet was welcomed with thehype that characterizes major pop events.

The theme of the piece, written by twelve hands (!!!) by Ferro, Elodie, Federica Abbate, Jacopo Ettorre, Dj Toss and Pietro Paroletti, who also produced it (under the stage name of Golden Years, pseudonym with which he signed the productions of the hits of Mahmood, Coez and Frah Quintale), is the betrayal. Sung in two voices. “At an after party at six, when you were with her, inside the bathroom, an hour at a party in LA, in the elevator of a hotel, in the cold outside a set, in the parking lot of a club”, sing Tiziano and Elodie, listing all the times they have caught their respective (imaginary) partners in the act.

.Practically an “I love you” 3.0, twenty years later. “One is too little, two are many, how many princesses have you hidden from me in the castle”, Tiziano sang in 2004 in the single from “111”, the album of “Xverso”, “Sere nere” and “Non me lo me explain “, on an r&b base which the following year was taken up by Jake La Furia and Marracash for their “Le I want full”, a cocaine dealing-themed reinterpretation of the Latina singer-songwriter’s hit (“Three are few, four are too many / how many lines can I get out of that piece?”), today considered a cult of Italian rap.

Ferro was 24 years old at the time. Today he is 44 years old and perhaps going back to playing with those sounds could be risky: but then again He’s been trying to regain that post-adolescent dimension for years. And if between experiments such as the album “Il lavoro della vita” of 2016 and “Accetto miracoli” of 2019, produced by none other than the American R&B guru Timbaland, Was “Feeling” the most successful?