Tiromancino, in search of balance

That today 2016 returns to circulate on social media as a collective emotional archive is nothing but a coincidence. ‘January 2016’, a song written eight months ago by Federico Zampaglione without any prediction of this nostalgic return, intercepts the same need: to look back not to idealize, but to understand where we started again. It is in this temporal short circuit that the song that anticipated the release of Tiromancino’s new album – the fourteenth to be exact – finds its most current strength, ‘When I Least Expect It’, out on February 6th. “It’s a record born like this, like when you have a child without planning it. It was he who wanted to be born, I had the marginal role of recording the songs. And the title reflects all this”, he said when meeting the press.

Guitars, blues and sonic freedom

An album that “wanted to be born”: this is how Federico Zampaglione talks about the album which he defines as the freest he has ever made. “We’ve been in music all our lives and it’s strange to me, because I thought that the 2011 album was the last album and instead I fell for it again. We went into the studio with Leo Pari and Simone Guzzino to give shape to some songs that I had in my drawer and that I didn’t know what would happen to them, without any pretensions. Sometimes you realize that when you don’t plan, when you don’t have deadlines or expectations, the music manages to be more sincere”. Zampaglione indulged his musical passions, dusting off the guitars and filling the album with blues, rock, country, electronic, reggae sounds and typical sounds of 70s songwriting. “A record came out with songs about my style and a series of musical influences linked above all to blues and rock. I realized that a gap had been created between the sound of records and that of live shows, where the guitars come out much more. And so I chose to use a guitar that is not usually used in pop, typical of acoustic blues, mixing it with electronics and more modern solutions.”

Collaborations and internal balance

An example of this is ‘Sto da Dio’, which tells of the great fear of not giving up one’s place in the spotlight. “I have found an internal balance in life in which I feel good – comments the Tiromancino frontman – I am happy to be in my shoes, it is enough for me to be who I am and to have allowed myself the luxury of no longer having expectations, neither on things nor on people”. In the song the collaboration with the pianist Andrea Pesce and with Franco 126 is renewed, who also lent his hand to make the text of ‘Il cielo’, written during Zampaglione’s hospitalization in hospital, more dreamlike. “I consider Federico a little brother, I followed the birth of his latest album and for me he is one of the best writers of contemporary lyrics in Italian music. I see myself in his slightly overshadowed attitude, we share a great passion for the Caliph and he is one of my daughter’s favorite artists, just to close the circle.” The one with “Franchino” is not the only collaboration on the album. “I like collaborating with other artists because interesting, different things come out. Like in the piece with Simona Molinari, who lent me her voice on the last album, but I also think of the ones with rappers that I was already doing in the early 2000s.”
But there is one in ‘When I Least Expect It’ that certainly does not go unnoticed, the one with her father Domenico, professor of history and philosophy. “My father has always been a member of the band in all respects. From 2004 with ‘Amore Impossibile’ and then in all the albums up until this one, in which he collaborated on ‘Gli alieniriamo noi’, which we finished writing during a long telephone chat, and ‘Una vita’, a nocturnal journey down memory lane. He is always stimulating, after all he is a philosopher”.
But he too, deep down, loves to philosophize, as emerges in his reflection on contemporary society. “In a record today, you can’t help but talk about what society has in store for us every day. It’s hasty, judgmental, linked to appearance. Either you attack or you praise, as long as you do it quickly. You risk getting lost and feeling inadequate. In the face of all this, music is my medicine, my happy island.”

The return to live: a “much played” tour

the ‘When I Least Expect It Tour’ departs on April 10th from the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome and then travels between Bologna, Taranto, Milan, Catania, Palermo, Perugia and Florence. For the occasion, Tiromancino will propose a show enriched by the presence of a string quartet and a new setlist with songs from the new one in which Federico Zampaglione will be accompanied by Francesco Stoia (bass), Marco Pisanelli (drums), Antonio Marcucci (guitar) and Fabio Verdini (keyboards). “It will be stimulating to play the new songs, keeping the hard core of those that if we don’t do the audience will leave the room – jokes Zampaglione, who adds -: it will be a very busy tour, in the spirit of this album”.

And Sanremo?

The question about Sanremo is inevitable, especially at this time of year. Had he thought about it? “Yes, like every year for 12 years. At the beginning of the summer I say I’ll go, then in the autumn I get paranoid and give up”, says Zampaglione, who has performed three times at the Ariston, where this year he would have liked to bring ‘When I Least Expect It’. “In 2000 with ‘Strade’ we came surprisingly second, while 2008 was catastrophic and tragicomic, so much so that my mother made me promise not to go there again. Last year I went back for the cover evening as a guest of Willie Peyote. I have a block, my emotional side suffers that stage. I see young artists who go up there as if nothing had happened, it makes me anxious because you know that everyone will judge you for those 3 and a half minutes, in which they can anything can happen.”