“It Seems Like Yesterday”, the Songs of Edoardo Bennato
The collection was released on September 17, 2000, with three unreleased songs (“It’s About Love”, “It Seems Like Yesterday” And “Taraunta dad”), “It seems like yesterday” Of Edward Bennato. The following is the review he wrote for us Luca Bernini at that time.
It seems like yesterday, of course, and instead more than twenty years have passed, in which we have gone from school to work, we have added a family to our lives, trips out of town, holidays with the dog and a fair amount of responsibility. When we look in the mirror, at best we realise that we have only gained a little weight, some have lost a bit of hair, others kill themselves in the gym and others, simply, let themselves go. How many remember the dreams and glory days of high school?
He, on the other hand, is always there, looking at us with that strange grin, his hair still combed like it was twenty years ago, the harmonica stand in front of his mouth, the Campi Flegrei T-shirt, the unstitched jeans from ’63.
At this point, with hindsight, we can say that the fairytale world of his first albums, reread now, reveals signs of a pathology, that of Peter Pan syndrome, which Bennato can rightfully boast of having invented. And which he expresses in the most absolute synthesis, without tying it to the 30-year-old who is afraid of growing up, but as a child who does not want to become an adult. And that’s it. If we wanted to find a noble role for him today, we could say that he represents our past that comes to disturb us every now and then and to ask us to account for and reason some slip-up, for too many alibis given in everyday life. A sort of talking cricket.
The truth is that, personally, I like to think back to the dreams of the past listening to Springsteen and see him in front of me as he is today, a 50-year-old man, who does not hide the passing of time, rather than a parchment-bound clone of what twenty years ago was “the singer-songwriter”. These personal considerations do not take away even a gram of value from Bennato the musician, who has always been a character of stature and value above all suspicion.
“Sembra ieri” is the latest chapter in the saga of “greatest hits re-played with unreleased songs”, if I’m not mistaken, inaugurated almost 10 years ago by the same record company for which Bennato is now recording with “La forza dell’amore” by Finardi, who also has – coincidentally like Bennato now – a turbulent relationship with Fonit Cetra, a state record company recently purchased by WEA. Inside the CD, a nice and long comic strip retraces the stages of the troubled gestation of this album, making it clear without too many turns of phrase that it is the meeting point (right? Not right? I won’t be the one to say, you decide…) between what the market wants and what Bennato wants.
An album of well-known (good) songs and three unreleased (good) ones that ‘reposition’ Bennato on the market and put in the shops an album of his famous songs capable of making him known, in the wake of the singles, even to those who don’t know him (but who doesn’t know him?).
Since BMG has decided to publish collections of its artists – the very famous double albums with the production of the 70s – but not to adequately publicize them, this replayed collection slips into the hole, giving a patina of novelty to very famous songs. From a discographic point of view, a job well done, therefore, that cannot but be listened to with pleasure. However, it would be too easy to speak well of this CD only because it is a good CD, also because, out of 18 good songs, 15 were already good and present before this album came out. Which is why I ask myself (and ask): what value does an album like this have on the artistic side? Is it really a service to music to publish an album like this? And Bennato, who continues to describe himself as somewhere between a renegade and a drifter, doesn’t realize the squeezing of his old repertoire in the name of the market?
