Full Circle Playlist

Io vorrei… non vorrei… ma se vuoi - Il Mio Canto Libero, 1972, Lucio Battisti

I was born in the small ancient town of Orbetello in southern Tuscany, Italy. Growing up next to Etruscan ruins, Spanish and Fascist-era architecture and a beautiful and unique brackish lagoon right by the Tyrrhenian waters of the Mediterranean sea, it’s natural that the first song on this playlist was going to be Italian. Being the singer of the family, my dad tried to introduce me to music several times - I've seen old VHS videos of me banging on pots and pans on the floor while Sugar Fornaciari or Michael Jackson played in the back - but nothing really stuck at first, only a love for making noise and for sound in general. It was actually my mom who introduced me to my very first music crush: Lucio Battisti. If you haven't heard of him, do yourself a favour: hit the link above and let your own ears be the judge. If I had to describe him in one sentence I would say that Battisti is as if Serge Gainsbourg and Joan Baez wento to Italy and gave birth to David Bowie. Which is funny because in an interview, the Thin White Duke himself said that Lucio Battisti was one of his favourite singer songwriters in the world. Bowie even translated to English the lyrics of one of Battisti’s most famous and beloved songs, Io Vorrei… Non Vorrei.. Ma se Vuoi… which Mick Ronson released in his 1974 album Slaughter on 10th Avenue. I should mention that I did not choose this song as the overture for my playlist for that reason alone: I don’t have many favourite songs, or movies, or books for that matter, but I can easily say that this song was one of the first tunes ever to make my mind wander. Still to date, the chorus of this song, lyrics included, is one of the best refrains I've ever heard. As a musician and a singer songwriter myself, I owe a lot to Lucio; people also used to call me Battisti because my puffy curly hair looked just like his when I was younger and because I always carrried a guitar with me wherever I went. I still remember the day my mom came home from work, a day like many others in September 1998, her face sad as if she had lost someone close, when she told me: “He died. Lucio died.” Since then she believes that with their intuition artists can sometimes anticipate things that will take place in the future, and she always quotes the lines from Lucio’s song Ma è un canto brasileiro:

“I would have liked to see you picking lettuce from the garden that I wish I farmed before I died.”

My mom believes a lot of things but I'm pretty sure this was just a coincidence (read my Vocal article Kronos & Kairos for the difference between Coincidence and Synchronicity) since those words were actuallty written by Battisti's long-time collaborator, the famous lyricist Giulio Mogol. Many years later, while studying at the Conservatory of Music in Milan, I took a masterclass in a music school that he founded, known as CET (Centro Europeo Tuscolano - more on this later, for the fourth song of this playlist). However, well before then Battisti had already left an indelible mark on my story: even when I started taking one-on-one guitar lessons with my dad’s cousin - who, legend says, once played guitar on stage with Deep Purple when Ritchie Blackmore took too long in the bathroom doing God knows what - I wasn’t doing lines like Ritchie, I wasn’t exploring meandering Jazz harmonies or exotic flamenco rhythms… I larned Lucio Battisti’s songs. And funny enough, my teacher - and first cousin once removed - is also called Lucio. Chance or destiny?

I Want To Break Free - Greatest Hits II, 1991, Queen

I was in Middle School when my dad finally gifted me something that, retrospectively, was one of the most important physical objects I've ever had in my entire life. It was a VHS cassette of music videos by Queen that he had recorded on TV throughout the years, a wonderful home-made customised compilation that embodied his love for music and his dedication in curating a small but precious listening experience for himself, my mom and one day his children. I still remember the feeling watching that tape, a hint that things were never gonna be the same. After school, I would spend literally entire afternoons with my face glued to the TV as if I was hypnotized, ignoring my beloved Playstation 1 sitting at my grandparents house, neglecting my friends at the park or ringing random doorbells around town. I had been captured, and my captor was Freddie Mercury, the killer queen, Mr. Bad guy, and I was definitely developing Stockholm syndrome. Shocked, scandalised, amused by the ridiculous wigs worn by his band mates and his extravagant bodypaint as a homage to Nijinsky’s faun. I wanted to scream along “I want to break free”, I wanted to sing it loud and clear, to the world, to my parents, my teachers and all my oblivious fellow hometowners. And gosh, I wanted to sing and play and move like them. I didn't know at the time, but Queen’s music and Mercury’s flamboyant, ravishing and passionate performances, reached deep inside of me in a way that I couldn’t have possibly anticipated as an Italian small town boy raised Catholic. The experience of absorbing their music so obsessively awakened something in me that was dormant, helped me get in touch with my feminine side and eventually fully accept and embrace my growing queerness. Even now, every time I question my identity or someone else questions it, being a conundrum that logic alone cannot answer, my mind naturally goes back to those days spent, shimming and shaking my ass and raising my fist to the ceiling in front of the TV mirroring Freddie’s iconic pose, training my voice to extend higher and lower towards both ends of the spectrum… then something stirs again inside me and I remember who I am.

I didn’t know how to express all those feelings in words, but I always thought that if I decided to say something about it to my parents, they were going to be ok with it, because they’ve always been very progressive. As I would later come to find out, their progressive side wasn’t as much about their views on sexual orientation… It was progressive rock!

The Knife - Trespass, 1970, Genesis

The first CD I ever bought was a mistake. At the time I used to devour lots of fantasy books so when I saw an album with a dragon on the front cover I thought to myself "that's gotta be some amazing Lord of the Rings kind of music." When I got home and played my first music choice ever, Symphony of Enchanted Lands II: the Dark Secret I found out it was epic metal Italian band Rhapsody of Fire (at the time known simply as "Rhapsody"), which, let’s just say, was a long way from Lucio Battisti or Queen. My second CD was, of course, Queen's Platinum Collection - Greatest Hits I, II & III, which definitely taught me not to judge an album by its cover. The third album I ever bought was Trespass by British band Genesis. That LP formed the ultimate bridge between my love for both classical and modern music and opened the gates of my musical imagination onto a world I had no idea existed. I get a nostalgic lump in my throat thinking about the old grey portable CD player I carried with me everywhere. Of course, in the US they came out at the end of the 90’s, but Italy is always at least half a decade late on the schedule so there it became a thing only in the early 2000’s. Trespass became my daily fix of progressive rock. Like I said, those days I was also an avid fantasy reader (and privately a writer), so Genesis also fed the growing storyteller in me and my secret passion for mythology. Most songs from Peter Gabriel-era's albums by Genesis are based on or incorporate mythological or folkloristic elements - and even stories from the Bible - which made the whole experience even more fun. I loved falling in a deep dreamy state, half asleep half awake, on my school bus on the morning commute to high school, listening to the entire album every time, feeling as if I had been abducted by fairies into one of their magic circles and spent years dancing in their ring-around-the-rosey while the rest of humanity grew old and unaware that Phil Collins and Peter Gabriel were ever in the same band.

In high school I also formed my first band, together with my hometown friend and twin from another universe, Enrique. He and I would go on having a long history together: living, travelling and working as a duo for many years (people had theories that we were either brothers, cousins or a couple) and to this day, even though we live poles apart, we're in touch on a weekly basis and constantly embark on weird new projects together, but more on him later, for the last song on this playlist. When we formed our first band we knew right away that we were going to be writing music together for many years, because as soon as that project was over (try not to get into a relationship with your drummer!), we were already searching for new members and a new name.

Tango Loco (Il tango del trasloco) - Due volte nello stesso fiume, 2014, La Belvert

When high school was (finally) over, our lead guitar player Frederick talked us into renting an apartment in Florence all together to pursue music professionally. After two years starving and writing a whole musical show in the city of Dante, we went on a mini-tour in Bosnia and upon our return one of our lyricists, long-time collaborator and friend Yuri convinced us that our music would have a much higher chance to "hit the playlists" if we were based in Milan. So, yet again, we packed our bags and musical instruments and ventured North. My years in the Capital of Fashion and Design were a time of rewarding conquests, rich collaborations and radical changes: I went back to school and only one year into studying music I was given the opportunity to join a very special masterclass at the school founded by Battisti’s lyricist Mogol in the Umbria region, near Narni (inspiration for C. S. Lewis’ Narnia). I spent three weeks in their beautiful estate, learning how to write supposedly better pop songs, how to navigate the highly political landscape of Italian music and how to professionally frolic on the grass with other well-educated musicians. It was there, on the freshly cut lawn, that I saw them: a boy and a girl my age, seemingly free of any worries. Her name was Federica, she was casually playing a viola as if she was scrolling through social media; his name was Carlo, or Charlie as we used to call him because he always wore very American-looking sunglasses, and played guitar like he was born holding it in his hands. It's as if they were waiting for me, calling for me with their "siren serenade", asking me to join them. So I did, and as soon as we went back to Milan, I introduced them to Enrique and shortly after La Belvert was born. Our first album was written on the move, literally moving between houses, cities, concerts, countries, relationships, the very name of the album, “Due volte nello stesso fiume”, means “twice in the same river”, a nod to Panta Rei, an idea by Greek philosopher Eraclitus, that you cannot bathe twice in the same river because everything is in a constant state of flow and change. To launch this album and celebrate the mysterious force that brought us together we created an online multimedia game where you can remix one of the tracks on the disc, read a short story I wrote in nine parts and interact with nine beautiful hand-drawn illustrations made by Enrique. We then loaded Federica’s dad’s truck with all our instruments and hit the road again on a mini tour across Europe, moving again. The recurring theme of the album is indeed Change, becoming, transitioning from one place to another, from a relationship to another, from childhood to adulthood… you get the gist. The song Tango Loco (Spanish for "crazy tango") embodies this quality more than any other. It was written by Enrique many years before when we were still living in Florence, an eclectic song full of variations in tempo and key, a chaotic and almost onomatopoeic portrait of our frantic experience moving between (too) many apartments, carrying all our things like sinners pushing boulders up a hill in Dante's Inferno, our pots and pants, our clothes and music instruments, all stacked on a decrepit wobbly shopping cart, leaning sideways like the Tower of Pisa and losing pieces (of clothing and of the cart itself) as we pushed it on the charming but very impractical cobblestone streets of Florence and Milan. The subtitle of the song means "tango of the house-move." This song embodies all the ups and downs of navigating life as broke ambitious students trying to figure out what path we were going to choose in life. When we finally pulled it together, I cannot describe how proud we were to see our music finally on Spotify and a beautiful hand-made album case designed by Enrique and printed by our new label, Marioucha Sound. It felt like things were finally changing, for good… and oh my, things really were about to change.

Thunderbolt - Biophilia, Björk

At the end of 2014, a prominent publishing house in Italy asked me if I was interested in writing the next volume in their science book series: a biography of Serbian-American electrical engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla. Although I was studying music at the time, my life-long dream has always been to be a writer. I never thought it was going to manifest through science, but I followed a hunch and dove head straight into the project. In September that year I started reading everything I could find about Tesla and science in general, given that up to that point my only interactions with the subject had only been science class in school and my eager consumption of my dad’s science magazines collection on weekend trips with our RV. Nevertheless, by December I had drafted the first chapter and gave it to the editor, since there were other writers involved as potential candidates. They must have liked it because I spent the following six months writing the book 24/7, interviewing scientists, bookworming through papers, and ultimately attempting to unravel Tesla's complex personal and scientific legacy. By June the ten chapters and two appendices in the final manuscript went out for print and finally, there it was. What fascinated me the most about Tesla, and what got me into accepting the job in the first place, was his talent for integrating science and art, creativity and logic. He was affected by a strong form of synesthesia, spoke nine languages (including Latin and Italian!) and was able to prototype his inventions in his head and build them with no flaws. Famously, in his notebooks he would describe strange phenomena from his lab experiments with high energy plasma, and would use complex mathematical equations on one page and fine poetry on the other. This mindset informed many generations of scientists and artists, who strived to reach the same peak of integration between natural and artificial, beauty and precision, scientific and creative approach. One of them is undoubtedly Björk, one of the most original and innovative artists in modern music. One night, while researching for the book I found out that for her 2011 album Biophilia together with her team of scientists and mad artists she designed and built several new musical instruments, including a "singing Tesla coil" hooked up to a synthesiser that used the lightning discharges to make music, which she used for her song Thunderbolts. That became one of my number one soundtracks for writing the book and showed me how far I could go in merging art and science to create beautiful new things. Which is exactly what I did next.

Mission to Earth - 2020, Nyado & Phy

I met my business partner Idan at an international summer gathering in Wales. Little did we know that we were going to go from jamming to starting a production house together. Fast forward to 2017, I just finished sharing with all my friends about Tesla and what I learned on green tech working with Watly, when Idan approaches me, his face as red as his hair for the excitment, and tells me “Edo, we need to write a song about this, I already have a melody and a beat.” We spent the following week writing the backbone of the song and dreaming about a music video that would tell a story of hope and unity, of people rejoicing to take care of our planet instead of abandoning it to go colonize others out there. We finished the song on the couch of my old apartment in Milan then spent the following two years assembling the resources and workforce to make that dream come true. The overall concept was to make a danceable/singable song with a sci-fi music video that would integrate a real-life climate tech solution on one side and an artist from a country that could potentially benefit from it on the other. We chose Watly as the sustainable tech, started looking for our "astronaut singer" around the world and found Phy in Nairobi, Kenya in 2018. We flew straight there a few months later to meet her, record the music and film the video. Stepping on that plane was like boarding a spaceship headed to an unknown location in the universe. What made the trip and literally the entire mission successful was the crew: an incredible team of friends, talented artists and innovators who believed in our vision and helped us turn it into a reality. That night on the plane, I sang the melody of our song in my head over and over to help it manifest, while the bright urban structure of the cities shapeshifted from grids to circles in the darkness below we moved more and more South. I knew our lives were about to change forever, when in January 2019 we landed in Nairobi, one of Africa's beating hearts of Afrofuturism. Phy’s manager and music producer at the time, Tim “Timwork” Rimbui from Ennovator Music helped us record and produce the song in his studio in the city. Our mutual friend Onn Halpern had jumped on board as the director and helped us found an inspiring and accomplished VFX artist, Ori Ben-Shabat, who had worked in major Hollywood productions and was now ready to be part of a project that would merge entertainment with doing good in the world. We filmed for three days straight in a village in Masai Mara, at a school in the Dandora slum, around the streets of Nairobi, performed the song live at Africa Nouveau Festival, then went on to our second shooting location: the Alps between Italy and Slovenia, where we filmed footage for an alien planet covered in snow for the intro of the movie. After six months of post-production, Mission to Earth was finally ready to be presented to the world on the best screen we could possibly hope for: at the United Nations in Bohn, Germany. Phy’s dream had always been to one day have done something so meaningful that she would get to speak at the United Nations. Although through a different door (as always) her dream had now finally come true. She sang like a real astronaut and introduced the project in front of the crowd of the Global Festival of Action, then the following year for Peace Nobel Laureate Pr. Muhammad Yunus at his Global Social Business Summit in Berlin, and finally for none other than Pope Francis, his holiness himself at the Economy of Francesco event, in Assisi (Italy). Although the Covid pandemic prevented us from fully sharing Mission to Earth as we were hoping, it was still a success and a life-changing experience to say the least, and most importantly a chance for us to do something for our beautiful fragile planet Earth and to tell you about it with a song. For part of the time, Idan and I were following the unfolding of the campaign remotely: by then we had already started working on the pre-production of our next film - Gather - in Bali (Indonesia) and I was getting ready to get married.

The Prayer - Céline Dion & Andrea Bocelli

In case you didn’t know, this song was actually written in two separate parts for the 1998 animated movie Quest for Camelot, and only later recorded as a duet by Andrea Bocelli and Céline Dion. This is the (much) shorter version of the serendipitous story of how I found out about their version and how that allowed me to meet the love of my life.

The first idea for Mission to Earth came while working on communication for Watly, a rising eco-startup building solar-powered water purification systems for developing countries. At the time they were being approached by many students from all around the world, which was making me want to somehow leverage on their enthusiasm to spread the inspiring work we were doing. One of these students, a graduate from Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia called Racquel, wanted to do an internship with us. I had a really good feeling about her, so we connected a few times on Skype (remember that thing?), met with her teacher (who, fun fact, was also from Italy) got greenlit from Watly’s HR and CEO and in the summer of 2017 Racquel flew to Bogota, Colombia for three months. to with me as her supervisor I was living in Denmark at the time and we didn’t have the means to send me to South America so I worked remotely the entire time, which definitely felt like a quest. When the internship was over, something felt as if it was left hanging: Racquel and I stayed in touch and started discovering that we had many things in common. Our lives were strangely connected: of course we were both into sustainability, but also theater, music, we were both singers and musicians and really loved many of the same artists and songs. On top of that we were both born in 1990, the year of the Horse in Chinese Astrology, both were Sagittarius born just ten days apart from each other, and curiously we were both committed to using our fiery passion for the arts to raise awareness and spread positive change in the world. As two long years went by, we slowly got closer and closer, started sending each other longer and longer texts and voice messages in Spanish and Italian, and even sent each other covers on the fly as we were chasing each other around the world like hunter and fox. Racquel traveled to Liberia, Africa, for her second internship, shortly after I went to Kenya to film Mission to Earth. After her graduation she decided it was time for her to take a long-due vacation exploring Europe, bike the Camino de Santiago, visit Denmark, Germany, Portugal, Spain and finally come see me in Italy. Only problem, I had just left for Bali for the pre-production of Nyado's second film! "Will we ever actually meet in person?" we asked ourselves. "And if we will meet, are we gonna be best friends or are we going to be something more?" This we didn’t say, but we definitely both thought about it. Soon Racquel’s time in Europe come to an end so after almost three months working in Indonesia then Thailand, I realized it was time for me to go back to finally meet her before she'd leave again for the US. I found a very cute Airbnb for us in Malaga, Spain, but... it only had one giant bed, so I texted Racquel and casually asked her if that was ok for her. Surprisingly, she said yes. "Was that a hint or was she just a very open person? Am I overthinking this or am I not thinking about it enough?" The day we met she took a bus from Portugal, I took a bus from Madrid, sharing our GPS location with each other. It’s still shared to this day. Racquel and I got married on a winter solstice, three months later on the island or Kaua'i where she and her family had moved twenty years before. When she came off that bus, it hit me that I had never seen anything like that: her magnificent curly hair exploded in a giant beautiful mane; she wore two bagpacks, one in the front and one on her back with a ukulele sticking out of it. We rented two e-scooters to get home and while riding I almost got into an accident several times: I couldn’t keep my eyes off of her and couldn’t stop smiling. To honor our tradition of singing to each other even when we were apart, we decided we were going to play a few songs at our wedding ceremony... but which ones? There's so much music we both loved but we didn’t want to turn our ceremony into a concert! What song embodied both our languages, our cultures, our desire to create lasting positive change in the world, and the sacred nature of our improbable yet impending union? That’s when we found out about our common obsession for cartoons and that as kids we both fell in love with Quest for Camelot and its wholesome soundtrack.

“Have you ever heard Céline Dion and Andrea Bocelli’s version of the song they sing when they’re in the cave before going back to Camelot?” - she asked me.

“Wait, there is another version of that song?!”

We sang The Prayer a capella right before the exchange of our rings. Our wedding was on the edge of a cliff overlooking the “Canyon of the Pacific” in Koke’e State Park on the “Garden Island”. I will never forget the solstice wind howling, the tall white waterfall against the stark red dirt typical of Waimea, Kaua'i raging in front of us after the first winter rain. At the reception party the day after, my wife sat me on a chair in front of everyone and danced hula for me; we barely ate any dinner, including the cake, because we played two hours of music to entertain our guests since deep down, we did want to turn our wedding into a concert!

Now you know why my last name is hyphenated and that Bocelli and Dion sang The Prayer first, but not last.

Ouroboros Healer - Ourooboros Healer, 2022, Enrique Spacca

Of course, getting married during a three month stay on Kaua’i means that your honeymoon is going to inevitably have a Hawaiian tint to it. Nevermind that we were working night shifts to be in sync with the Nyado team in Europe and sleeping until late morning, we still had the time of our life and went on several trips all around the island. Our “extended honeymoon” plans were to go back to Bali to shoot Nyado's second film but, right before launching Mission to Earth on 02/02/2020 (see what we did there?) I got selected to take part in the JUMP music business accelerator, nine events in nine different European countries throughout the year. So we decided to cross the Atlantic again and crafted a whole master plan to travel around Europe, this time together, joining each event at a slower travel pace, testing various eco-friendly means of transportation. We started our own Patreon and YouTube channel and planned to vlog our life on the road making music and building community around Europe, going back to my hometown in Tuscany only once in a while, including on the summer solstice to repeat our wedding ceremony for my Italian family. Sounds like a fun plan, right? Though, if you were paying attention, you already know what happened instead. Sadly, on the way back from the first event of my program in Manchester, England everything shut down for the pandemic and we ended up getting stuck with my family. For the next nine months we took online East Coast swing dance lessons, wrote an album worth of music and shot many videos at home and around town. If you want to have a laugh or enter a world of domestic and outdoor dreamy set design, AR music videos and English-Italian Pokémon intro song mashups, visit our website or YouTube channel. The song I chose for this chapter of my life is actually not our own, but was written by our friend Enrique Spacca, who you've already met with La Belvert. By that time he had been living in Switzerland for a few years and was ready to finally record his first solo album, and we were definitely ready to get out of my hometown! Remember the eco-nomadic plan to bike and vlog around Europe? During the first summer of the pandemic things temptatively opened up again so we took our odds and executed a smaller version of that plan, bought two road bikes and rode from Italy to Switzerland, Warmshowering and basking along the way. We made it to Fribourg a week later, where we joined Enrique and his partner our friend Charlotte, recording music for a whole day of wonders and magic. On the train crossing the Alps and in the weeks on the road Racquel and I had learned all the guitar parts and backing voice of the album so when we got there we were ready to hit the hot microphones and partake in this serendipitous creative act! The album is a remarkable exploration of singing songwriting, piano music and many beautiful questions; bold and humble at once, featuring songs in three languages - French, English and Italia - crafted by the fascinating mind of a very talented and original thinker, visual artist, composer and multi-instrumentalist, as well as by his wish to make it a community effort, inviting his friends to record it with him. After a couple of weeks living with them, Racquel and I biked back to Italy and a few months later we both turned 30 and moved back to Kaua'i where we remained for the following three years, got a dog and kept playing live music every single week. Somehow it felt like finally coming back home, full circle, like the Ouroboros from Enrique’s album, also a recurring elements in my mom’s Mother Nature-themed paintings. Another part of me felt, and still feels, like I'm still on that journey, the quest that started when I left my hometown to pursue music after high school, an adventure from which I don’t think I will ever return.