Vasco remembers De André: “He changed my life”

Twenty-seven years ago he left Fabrizio De André after having changed the history of Italian music forever. It definitely changed my life Vasco Rossias the rocker himself recalls on Instagram: “Fabrizio was the only great artist who I really got to know in a profound way”.

In the early 1980s he contacted me directly, he wanted to come and visit me and meet me in person. He came down with Dori, his partner, and I met De André who had come to my house! I was stunned, because in my opinion it was a meeting of the Madonna, something sacred… We dated for a wonderful period, I went to her house many times. For me he has always been an absolute point of reference, even today I write always thinking of him. I feel like it’s my personal Nobel. When he recognized me as an artist I was so intimidated that I was literally about to kneel in front of him, but instead he nodded at me, as if to say: “What are you doing?”. And he immediately put himself on the same level as me, as an equal.

“He was the one who broke the mold the most in my opinion”, adds Vasco, “the one who for the first time said things really clearly in the Italian musical panorama, as well as saying them in a beautiful musical way. He opened up a new world to me, the ability to understand things, to see them from another point of view. Critical skills, of deep meditation. He was also the first who made me understand that I could also not agree with what he himself said. Intellectual disobedience: I had self-criticism learned with the theater, criticism from him, a fundamental step that I had never considered possible before: question even your teachers…”.

We too paid homage to Fabrizio De André, trying to summarize his thoughts in ten (his) sentences: you can find them here.