The List Representative: “There is an industry that churns out shit”

“Happy Days”, the new album by La Representative di Lista, is a wild dance on the edge of a precipice, it is a liberating and rebellious song while there is war all around. The singer, actress and author Veronica Lucchesi and the multi-instrumentalist, author and producer Dario Mangiaracina, with this new project out on October 25th, which will be presented with a tour in many Italian cities starting on November 4th, demonstrate once again that a ‘another way is possible. Their independent and identifying pop-rock, but at the same time aware of having to stay within a market, and therefore not manneristic or self-referential, has become a trademark. The Representative of Lista, in the songs (and yes, also in the interviews), unbuttons herself, undresses and shows herself exactly for who she is, without filters. By now we are all too often accustomed to injections of fiction, this manifest truth is, at times, wonderfully unsettling.

You’re in the middle of rehearsals for the tour: how are they going?
Dario: Very good, we have some new elements in the band: Donato Di Trapani, keyboard player, who has participated in several tours with Paolo Nutini, and Elisa Zimbardo, guitarist from Palermo, young and very good. They join other musicians who are with us: Roberto Calabrese, Carmelo Drago and Erika Lucchesi. It’s a beautiful team with which the record is becoming “three-dimensional”, very fun and powerful. We hope that all this reaches the public too.

How are the new songs fitting into the repertoire?
Veronica: We did the opposite. We started from the new album, which should be privileged. We have never felt as close to the music we wrote as we do today. We have chosen the rest of the repertoire following an attitude close to that of these new eleven songs. In some cases even re-arranging them.
Dario: Ten years have passed since the first album, “(Per la) via di casa”. Yet all the pieces in our repertoire continue to dialogue. This is a pride.

Why is this sound the one that represents you the most? How would you define it?
Veronica: It is music of the heart. Put like that it seems like bullshit, but in reality it is understood as that music that sticks with you the most when you are a teenager, when you are creating your taste and your identity. It is a music that responds to different direct feelings such as anger, furthermore inside there is also a sense of rebellion, because when you are in that adolescent age you also start to become a little disobedient and understand what you want, to stay tight inside constraints and labels. It’s an age when you’re shape-shifting. So it’s “music of the heart” because it responds to honest feelings and sticks with you.
Dario: We fished out from there, from that music that turned us on as kids, that between the 90s and 2000s: Blur, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Cardigans, Beastie Boys, Rage Against The Machine up to those who spoke in poignant way of love. We went fishing from the music that raised us. Everything passed through the great funnel of the Lista Representative who at a textual level has themes that she has always reiterated in recent years: femininity, relationships, complexity.

You titled it “Happy Days”, but today we live in anything but positive times. The album, in fact, is also full of pain. Why this choice?
Dario: The words most present in this album are “fear” and “world”. It is an album of exploration, but inside there is also a sense of defeat, of sadness due to these “not happy days”. The title is an oxymoron and it is also a desire. Often our songs are visions, not precise descriptions of reality.
Veronica: I don’t know whether to call it “hope”, maybe yes, it’s better “desire”. The title is precisely a sort of “desire” that all the darkness we are experiencing, and which we describe in our own way with songs, will be transformed into “splendid happy days”. My grandmother told me that during the war we married, celebrated, sang, read and wrote poetry. In the darkness there was light.

In many songs, which seem to be teetering on the abyss, there is also a feeling of resistance.
Veronica: Yes, but there is also another interpretation of the title, as we say in “The City On You”: “Television said everything is fine”. So the “happy days” can be those that we desire despite this era of pain, but also those that are falsely told to us as such even though they are not.
Dario: There is also a work by Samuel Beckett called “Happy Days” in which there is a couple who believe they are living wonderful days, but in reality they are stuck in a life that is always the same.

Your previous work, “My Mamma”, from 2021 can be framed within the period of your two participations in the Sanremo Festival in 2021 and 2022. “Giorni Happy” is independent of that phase of your career. In artistic terms what does this detachment mean?
Dario: We had a bonus with the discography, achieved thanks to the success of “Ciao ciao”, and therefore we took our time. Some time to work on this record. We believe we have always presented a proposal that is quite outside some mainstream patterns, even when we found ourselves within that mainstream. Having said that, it would be wrong to say “we no longer care about what we built”. We still want to speak to the public who arrived with “Ciao ciao” and with our Sanremo passages. We try to get on the radio, we try to break down a door, we try to enter and stay in there, but following our style, without conforming. With “The City On Us” we entered the top 50 on the radio, it was a success, and this is what we have to do.
Veronica: I don’t want to judge what we are doing. Having said that, we have a critical spirit, we are on alert. I don’t want to end up in blood-sucking circles that eat away at my life and subsume me into an existence I don’t want.

When you talk about “blood-sucking circles” are you referring to a certain discography?
Veronica: Of course, darling. There’s a music industry that churns out shit like loaves of bread. That’s not what we think music should do. Music is always art. And even when it’s poignant and talks about feelings it’s healthy, but when it leads to turning off the brain it’s like “open your mouth and eat this soup”.

The most representative piece of the album for me is “I stopped going out”. Inside there is anger and revenge. Could it be a photograph from above of the disk?
Dario: For us it was the real single of the album, but it wasn’t for the record companies (they laugh, ed.).
Veronica: This song reminds me of a dangerous attitude when one has not yet understood that one can disobey, that one can say “no”. It’s a good girl’s condescending attitude.
Dario: It’s really an Italian cultural issue: don’t give a damn. Look at how the protests have died down in recent years…
Veronica: It’s an attitude that perhaps comes from the family and then you also find in society. It’s a sort of: “the world hurts me, but I’m quiet and good”. Well, that can’t be the case. And it is an attitude that I also recognize that I have had. This can also lead to suffering for the person, who isolates himself and no longer has contact with others out of fear. Among other things, this society often tends to hide that suffering.
Dario: Or it turns everything upside down and capitalizes on it, exploits it. There are people who wonder: how many likes can I get when talking about mental health? And this is very dangerous because that person isn’t talking about important issues to fight for, but to get fucking likes.
Veronica: Returning to the song: sometimes you can feel alone and this can lead to anger, which however should not be transformed into violence, but into healthy and lucid movement in search of happy days.