Lucio Corsi: “Reinvento the past to rewrite tomorrow”
Listening to “I wanted to be a tough”, the new album by Lucio courses out for Sugar Music, is like entering a saloon populated by a sea of varied characters. A mix between the star wars bar and that of a Maremma province that smells of far west. You laugh, cry, dream, imagine, cross your gaze with reality. “The disc was born crawling on the sidewalks, hiding in the wardrobes or under the legs of the tables, turning among the dirty clothes in the washing machines, hanging on me with the springs to the hair, to the role spread, looking for memories not mine in the hats of others, looking for new horizons in the shoes of others”, says the Tuscan singer -songwriter. His life, after participating in the Sanremo Festival, was distorted: Tour Sold out of thousands and thousands of detached tickets, the Eurovision spotlight in May, after Olly’s renunciation, and even two mega-dates in the racecourse in Rome and Milan. It has gone from dressing the role of outsider to being a true musical phenomenon. “He just wanted to be Lucio,” but he became a star who doesn’t want to burn like a supernova.
How did you react to Olly’s renunciation?
We were at stake and we are convinced, with all the guys playing with me, of having to continue dancing. So I said to myself: let’s go to the Eurovision, let’s go to our way, without changing the song. There the staging counts so much, but I don’t care about fireworks. We will go sparse, direct. Maybe I will have just one more harmony.
In this album you put yourself in the shoes of others, which is then what a songwriter should do in some way. What do you like about these stories?
Many of the stories of the album have to do with the past, with adolescence, are stories experienced by me, or by friends, or by others or by people I have invented. Reinventing the past is something magical. The future is surprising, the past in theory no because we have already lived it. For this reason, if you re -elaborate it can surprise exactly like tomorrow, it can have the same effect and allows you to create another personal story.
Who populates the world what do you tell?
Francis Delacroix, an imaginary friend for me and for Tommaso Ottomano (author, producer and visual artist, editor’s note), or perhaps it is not. He is a photographer and travels over time. There is Rocco, the school bully. Wonderfully monstrous. And then also the king of the rave, from which, in his youth, I have always been fascinated.
De André wrote: “We storytellers go around lifting the dust from the memorable facts, we try to make myth or legend”. Is this the case for you too?
I am very fond of the songs starring particular characters. Theirs, in fact, can be small stories, but containing an epic that deserves to be told and that is sometimes more interesting than that of the great events. Except that today there are less and less pieces that focus on this type of characters. Instead, I am interested in deepening this genre, this way of making songs. Furthermore, I like the idea that these songs put the wings, which start from reality and wanted further.
To put the wings, teaches Peter Pan, you need a combination of happy thoughts and fairy dust. You have certainly the Fairy powder, the thoughts instead how are the thoughts?
Both happy and sad. And this is the beauty. I have always loved artists who have the power to make you squeak from laughing and shortly after move. I like the constant balance between laughter and melancholy. Lucio Dalla, Paolo Conte, Ivan Graziani, Vasco, Randy Newman have always managed to disdain various moods. And the most interesting aspect is when these names do not make it clear which emotional direction they are taking. That’s the beauty and that’s exactly what I tend to.
Ours is a tragicomic world as in “complicated situation”?
Just look around to realize it. We are all tragicomic.
A verse of your song “This life” comes to mind: “This life crushes us, but has no weight, we are so many different shadows that form the rainbow”.
In that song there is an awareness, it highlights our existence, its value. It is a reflection on life. It is the first song I wrote about the new album, over a year and a half ago. I recorded it immediately. I didn’t know if he would find a house or not, then he instead took a room in that building that became the album.
“In the middle of the night” is one of the most shining songs on the album. Can we define it as the song symbol of the project?
He is a collector of the main themes: there are me, my friends, there are the stories of others, there is friendship, there is the time flowing, there are the lights and shadows of our life. I published it in Christmas 2024 as an anticipation of the album. I also like it as a musical structure: it is long, it has a phrase that repeats itself and I am very happy to have not managed to arrange it. It is a camera, placed on a stand, which tells what passes in front, tells stories of the Maremma, of nights passed around. It’s a simple camera, it’s not a drone. For me it will always remain important because it was the first song in which I tried to tell the others …
But haven’t you always done it?
Yes, but always through other elements: the wind, the earth or the animals. In this song and in this album these metaphors are gone.
The success scares you? A few months ago on the street few recognized you, now you have difficulty walking.
I am happy with what happened to me. Because it happened to me at the age of thirty, after ten spent making records and concerts. Everything happened with the right people alongside, who are the ones who play and have always accompanied me. I feel that under me there are foundations to stay in balance. I want to be with my feet on the ground because I don’t want something to change musical level. I want to keep and defend the primordial instinct that has always prompted me to write songs.
