Volume 8 (Fabrizio De André album)

Volume 8
Studio album by Fabrizio De André
Released	1975
Recorded	Milan, Ricordi studios, 1975
Genre	Italian singer-songwriters
Length	32:51
Label	Ricordi BMG
Producer	Roberto Dané
Fabrizio De André chronology
Canzoni (1974)Canzoni1974 Volume 8 (1975) Rimini (1978)Rimini1978

Professional ratings
Review scores
Source	Rating
Allmusic	[1]

Volume 8 is an album released by Italian singer/songwriter Fabrizio De André. It was first issued in 1975 on Ricordi and then re-released by BMG. According to statements by De André within his posthumous autobiography "Una goccia di splendore" ["A drop of brightness"], released in 2012, his collaboration with Francesco De Gregori, which gave birth to six of the eight songs on the album, originated when De André saw his colleague live on stage in Rome and was very impressed. Afterwards, he invited De Gregori to visit him in his rural house in Sardinia, where the two of them spent a month "getting drunk together and writing songs in the meantime."

Track listing

1. "La Cattiva Strada" – 4:33
2. "Oceano" – 3:11
3. "Nancy" (Leonard Cohen, translation by De André) – 3:57
4. "Le Storie di ieri" (Francesco De Gregori) – 3:15
5. "Giugno '73" (De André) – 3:31
6. "Dolce Luna" – 3:25
7. "Canzone per l'estate" – 5:21
8. "Amico fragile" (De André) - 5:29

All songs written by Fabrizio De André and Francesco De Gregori, except where indicated.

Personnel

• Fabrizio De André - Guitars, Vocals
• Gigi Cappellotto - Bass
• Andy Surdi - Drums
• Oscar Rocchi - Keyboards
• Carmelo & Michelangelo La Bionda - Guitars
• Claudio Bazzari - Guitars
• Ernesto Verardi - Guitars

The songs

All of the songs on the album marked a stylistic shift for De André, especially for the lyrics, which are more poetical, more complex and less immediate than anything he released earlier. Reviewers at the time attributed this to the influence of De Gregori, who had a renown for writing stylized, not-readily-understandable lyrics and not always being able to explain them. However, "Giugno '73" and "Amico fragile" were both written by De André on his own before he met De Gregori, and feature the same linguistic and poetical depth as the rest of the album. He would return to his usual storytelling style on his next album, Rimini, co-written with the Veronese folk songwriter Massimo Bubola.

• "La cattiva strada" [literally "The bad road", but more properly rendered as "The errant way"] is about an unnamed man (or boy - his age is not explicitly defined) who corrupts various people in various situations; all of the people he meets end up following him along his "errant way". At the end of the song the protagonist has disappeared without explanation, and people see him as either purely bad or purely good. De André, however, philosophically concludes that "there is love, a little love for everyone, and everyone has a love, along the errant way."
• "Oceano" ["Ocean"] is an enigmatic, cryptic song, quite obscure and hard to interpret, whose lyrics were written by De Gregori as a dedication to Cristiano De André, Fabrizio's young son. Cristiano was fascinated by De Gregori's 1973 song "Alice", whose first lines say: "Alice looks at the cats and the cats look into the sun." When Cristiano asked De Gregori why Alice was looking at the cats and not at something else (like a streetlamp, or a bush, or a tree), the latter was unable to reply, but wrote "Oceano" instead. The song mentions a child who asks questions about green fields, rooms and the sea, possibly representing Cristiano, and a woman who is in love with a poet, a possible portrait of Dori Ghezzi.
• "Nancy" is a translated version of Leonard Cohen's song "Seems So Long Ago, Nancy", originally from his Songs from a Room album. The lyrics are about the true story of a young girl from Montréal who committed suicide.
• "Le storie di ieri" ["Yesterday's stories"], written entirely by De Gregori (who re-recorded the song on his album Rimmel in the same year) is about the choice of fascist ideology and its subsequent transformation into the MSI (post-fascist Italian party).
• "Giugno '73" ["June '73"], one of the few songs which De André wrote entirely by himself after 1967, is a highly metaphorical and idealized account of the start of his relationship with Dori Ghezzi. Autobiographical details mentioned in the lyrics include Ghezzi's mother's open hostility to De André, as he was "married, and morover, a singer" (he was still married to Puny Rignon at the time), as well as Ghezzi's scorn of her partner's male friends, described as shabbily dressed ("All of my friends are kind to you, but their clothes look a bit weird; you tell me I should bring them to a tailor's, and you ask me: 'Are they the best ones we have tonight?' "), and (initially) of De André himself ("Just wait for a more trustworthy lover").
• "Dolce Luna" ["Sweet Moon"] is a portrait of an old drunken man, possibly a former sailor, who roams the streets at night while reminiscing about a rugged and varied sea life (including a whale named "Sweet Moon"), which he may have never lived. In the last verse, the man speaks in the first person to a woman, possibly his wife, about wanting a son; he states not to care whether the boy will learn to swim or not, but he is sure that his son will be born with as big a desire for a seafaring life as his own.
• "Canzone per l'estate" ["Song for the summer"] features shared lyrics written over a previously existing piece of music by De Gregori. The words, an autobiographical portrait of De André as seen by someone else, describe the tension between the bourgeois life he grew up in and lived much of his life in, and his attraction to anarchism and to society's outcasts, who seemed more genuine and alive than the upper classes.^[2]
• "Amico fragile" ["Frail friend"], also written entirely by De André, is a detached and cynical account, delivered through seemingly unconnected images in the form of a stream of consciousness monologue, of an evening De André spent with a group of friends, during which everybody (including himself) got drunk; the singer-songwriter was forced to sing in spite of him not really wanting to, and, in his drunken state, exposed all of his friends' vices and defects in a series of truthful but unpleasant comments, some of which are reproduced in the lyrics. ("Do you know I've lost three children?" "Lady, you are a pretty distracted woman!") The title, an unnamed friend's depiction of De André as an extremely sensitive and needful person, has since become a common way to identify De André himself, especially in the various tributes produced after his passing.

References