Savoretti: “The feat with Zucchero? It's my double identity.”

“I would like people listening to this album to perceive it as a Jack Savoretti album, without thinking about what language I sing in. It's in Italian, but it's Jack Savoretti, it's not a Savoretti record in Italian”, underlines the singer-songwriter talking about “Miss Italy”, his first album in Italian. After the death of his father Guido, a true Genoese, Jack experienced a profound moment of confusion. The English singer-songwriter of Genoese origins has rediscovered his artistic spark by clinging to his roots and his bond with Italy, creating an ambitious project. “After my father's death I was writing a lot in English, but I didn't feel him there with me – he remembers – my father wasn't there in those songs. And I needed him. So I came to Italy and started working with Leading Guy (Simone Zampieri, ed.). I actually told him: 'teach me to write well in Italian'. I felt the flame rekindle, a flame that had died out a bit. I couldn't make my father listen to the songs anymore, the only way to continue to do so in some way was to sing in Italian.”

Many guests who accompanied him on this journey: Carla Morrison, Delilah Montagu, Miles Kane, Natalie Imbruglia, Svegliaginevra and Zucchero. The strong bond between Italian and English, not on a linguistic but also cultural level, is sealed in the collaboration with Zucchero in the song “Senza una donna (Without a woman)”. “This song allowed me to bring together my two identities for the first time – he continues – on the one hand Italian, my father's language which I spoke little at the time, but which I certainly understood more than my English peers, and on the other, English, the language of my mother who sang it at home duetting with my father when I was little. 'Without a woman' summed up their union, their relationship, exactly like me, half Italian and half English”. And on his friendship with Zucchero he remembers: “I interviewed him for a BBC show on the occasion of Eurovision in Italy. We have the same vision: we love Italian music, but we also understand some of its limitations. He is not considered an Italian artist, but Zucchero. And it's like that everywhere. 'Senza una donna' is an Italian song, but also an international one”.

Savoretti was also Zucchero's guest during the Italian singer-songwriter's dates at the Royal Albert Hall in London. A connection, that of Jack, with Italian music which was also staged last February 9th on the stage of the Ariston Theater in Sanremo on the occasion of the 74th edition of the Italian Song Festival where he performed Fabrizio De André's “Love you come, love you go” together with Diodato, an artist to whom he is very attached having been one of the pillars of his artistic training. Savoretti can boast a long list of collaborations ranging from the pillar of American songwriting Bob Dylan to the Australian pop diva Kylie Minogue passing through Nile Rodgers, James Blunt, Shania Twain but also Ex Otago and Elisa.

But he had never attempted an album entirely in Italian which he will present with a tour first in the summer arenas this summer and then in the autumn and winter in the theaters. “In the beginning, as the record took shape, I let myself be taken by it – he smiles – I kept repeating: 'let's write in Italian and make poetry'. The producer Tommaso Colliva, on the other hand, rightly made me reflect and ponder. And he encouraged me to be more colloquial like when I write in English, explaining that even in Italy, in recent years, songwriting has become less courtly and more direct. Hence the desire to involve English friends and other artists, who completed the project. My father will always live in these songs”.