Paolo Capodacqua, the profile of a singer-songwriter to discover

If in our area merit wasn’t just an empty formula for propaganda and bar chatter, if we were still able to recognize beauty from showy display, art from usefulness, the interesting from the profitable and true artists from hucksters mass, Paolo Capodacqua would certainly have the recognition and notoriety he deserves, rightfully filling the increasingly evident void of songwriting.

And instead I had to get to know him – and for this I make amends – thanks to the mechanical logic of the algorithm of an online platform which, rightly, in my playlist which grants citizenship only to songwriters, between Francesco Guccini and Claudio Lolli, here which inserts a song, “L’arancio ed io”, which I know well belongs to Maestrone’s first production but which this time is played, masterfully, by a certain Paolo Capodacqua: a quick Google search and I realize how much I have still to be learned and, fortunately, discovered.

Forty years of musical activity behind him, alternating author’s music and children’s songs (coherently held together by a clear pedagogical intent), and a twenty-year collaboration with Claudio Lolli who, now free from the stringent logic of the publishing market, he had elected his trusted guitarist – just like Guccini with Flaco – giving him in pectore, ironically, the diploma of Maestro at the non-existent Conservatory of Sulmona. But if there is no parchment to sanction Capodacqua’s artistic merits, there is certainly his unique and unmistakable style of moving between the unexpressed possibilities between a low E and a high E, which allow the non-master to freely make use of his mastery. of instinct, of the sensitivity of the true artist.

Born in 1961, proudly and obstinately from Abruzzo, Capodacqua’s musical and intellectual career follows tortuous and unpredictable paths: from the first and dutiful cover bands of Avezzano, to the humanly and poetically indispensable experience of the readings of Fermo (where among other things he will meet Angelo Ferracuti and for the first time Claudio Lolli), the discovery of De André and Brassens, the first censorships of provincial respectability, the DAMS and the thesis with Roberto Leydi on the futurist singer-songwriter Rodolfo De Angelis and finally the records, when they were still being made and it made sense to make them. Today, in the construction site, Paolo has a new project whose common thread is the nostalgia that accompanies the passage of age – when, in short, we realize that the days we have ahead of us are decidedly fewer than those we left behind – and which so far it is possible to listen to “only” the beautiful single “Gianni Rivera”, an epitaph of a dreaming world, football and beyond, and which today appears as a deception, a mirage of a fallacious memory desperately clinging to the carefree misery of suburbs and railing buildings, kicks thrown at unlikely and indomitable balls, heroes and epic matches of shin guards and striped shirts.

This is for the future, hopefully not too distant. The albums published date back to the recent and remote past: at the end of the 1980s “Memorabilia” (Sound Materials) with liner notes obviously signed by Claudio Lolli marks the artisanal and homemade debut as a singer-songwriter; followed by “Viaggio in Italia” (Hobo Records), which presents the live repertoire in the studio together with Lolli, and “La via del mare” (L’Unità) which links acting, another great passion of Paolo, to music, thanks also to Gianni D’Elia’s contribution. These are intersected, almost for no apparent reason, with records with songs intended for children, partly inspired by Gianni Rodari and partly completely original: not the usual banal nursery rhymes from festivals and television stages, but a songwriting for children and children, also appreciated by his friend Claudio who with his “Noah’s Ark” put his children to sleep for years.

But every fairy tale hides chaos and pain behind its apparent harmony, as life teaches us, despite our carelessness: in 2018, suddenly, Lolli dies, with whom a symbiotic and fraternal relationship had already been established, putting an end to a collaboration that he had seen them on a grueling, non-stop tour for nearly twenty-five years.

It is then, when your traveling companions stop and disappear, that you need to give yourself time to reflect and look for new routes towards the final and inevitable destination: reflective and dreamy at the same time, in 2019 “Wounds and wounds” was released ” which gracefully and wisely links the youthful furies of commitment and politics with the fairy-tale escape of childhood and the considered melancholy of maturity. And this is how Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s little prince can cross the desert (and deserts) of our time to give voice and name back to all those desperate survivors, with eyes full of shipwrecked dreams, who are reluctantly welcomed onto our coasts, reminding us that the horrors of the past were also perpetrated by respectable people (which we all consider ourselves to be) and by their guilty and silent connivance, imagining that the last smile of a teacher could really have been a comfort to a revolutionary on the threshold of the gallows, dreaming that the sacrifice of the heroes – whether guerrillas or magistrates – does not end up on a plaque that everyone, in the streets and squares, will sooner or later learn to ignore, confused from heavy mists, clouded by our selfishness and incapable of grasping the unexpected opportunities that open up when a wound reveals a new world to us, even through a fleeting slit.