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Fabrizio De André
Songwriter Fabrizio De André was born in Genoa on 18 February, 1940 from an affluent family. He spent the war years in the countryside and his youth in Genova, divided between street life and endless readings. He approaches music at 14 years of age by playing guitar in jazz groups and meets various Genoese artists. At 18 years of age he moves from the narrow alleys of the old city where he meets the social misfits he subsequently depicts in his songs. The texts of his songs distinguish themselves immediately from the songs popular in those years: they depict dropouts, denounce the war and abuses of power, accuse the hypocrisy of priggish people and reflect on big existential topics. Although devoid of publicity, shy, opposed by critics and censored by the media, he obtained an immediate success and his songs became immediately famous. His first tour was only in 1975 and the following year he moved with his partner, singer Dori Ghezzi, to Tempio Pausania, in Sardinia, where he starts a farm which from then on becomes his main activity. He declares that he is going to write songs only when he has something to say. In 1979 the two singers are kidnapped and kept prisoners in Barbagia in order to obtain a ransom. Freed after 4 months, the two artists, to everybody's surprise, forgive their captors, two Sardinian shepherds, in which De André saw a replica of the misfits he had met along the Genoese alleys. With the publication, in 1984, of LP Creuza de Mä, sung in Genoese dialect, De André promoted the value of Italian oral languages and introduced the use of almost disappeared Mediterranean instruments. The success of such work served as an inspiration to several artists and re-launched the phenomenon of Italian ethnic music. In the Nineties he recorded only two new albums: Le nuvole (1990) and Anime salve (1996), which besides the indisputable coherence of their ideas show the artistic maturity the songwriter had by then achieved. In 1998 he tours triumphally with his two sons Cristiano and Luvi. Struck by lung cancer, Fabrizio De André dies in Milan on January 11, 1999. His funerals, in Genoa, were attended by thousands of people from all over Italy. Condolence messages were received from artists all over the world, including Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen.
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