A little gentleman, a little naive, a little poet.
We often wonder why certain intense, fun and rhythmically captivating songs don’t fall into the planetarium of the best-known ones. But perhaps their beauty is also this: being hidden from most people. Joe Barbieri, a Neapolitan singer-songwriter who celebrated thirty years of career a few years ago, has produced many of these songs. A fascinating outsider, free from any cliché who started making music at fourteen, when he enrolled in the SIAE, and then became a musician capable of exporting his languages first to Italy and then throughout the world,
Joe, among the various adjectives that can be used to describe you is “elite singer-songwriter”
“If we want to use this expression, my music is elite both in Italy and abroad. I’m used to moving “in the shadows”, for a few, but that’s okay. What as a boy made me ask myself in some way why, has revealed itself over time: mine, simply, is a language that is probably not familiar or not sought after by everyone. And this, fortunately, leaves me the moral freedom, to follow an expression that is only a personal need, not bound by market laws or musical dictates.”
“Big Bang” is your latest album, released last April. Listening to it reminds you of some of Pino Daniele’s sounds, am I wrong?
“You haven’t gone far from the truth; this album sinks into those musical references, which were Pino’s listening, the soul and funk music of the sixties and seventies, in some way from Stevie Wonder up to the latest artists who released with Motown, the legendary record company that invented this soul sound with pop influences.
I make no secret that the figure of Pino Daniele has never left the bouquet of my soul artists. I keep thinking about him, getting inspired, discovering new things about him. Somehow, I try to let him guide me again.”
Pino Daniele was also your first producer. How was your meeting?
“It happened a few days after my high school exam: at that time I sent him a couple of audio cassettes to let him listen to my music. The first time he called me, directly, I didn’t believe the call and put the phone down thinking it was a joke! Then fortunately we met again and his proposal was to enter the recording studio to make my first album.”
First album which was followed by many others, with songs that are true masterpieces. Stefano Bollani defined your “Normamente” as the most beautiful ballad ever written. How did that song come about?
“Many of my songs are autobiographical, and this one in particular. It is linked to a long-distance love story, and when I felt it was about to end I wrote this song. I recorded it and took a night train to go and listen to it for this person. But he didn’t want to meet me. I spent the night at the station waiting for the return train.”
And here, the romantic people who are reading will let out a sigh of annoyance and disenchantment!
“Let’s say that I met her again some time later, at the end of one of my concerts in France.”
About concerts abroad. Among the various countries in which you have great success, Japan holds a leading place. Your songs, in addition to a delightful sound, are rich in words. It comes naturally to ask you how you would explain such a sensational success, in a country where it is difficult for those who listen to you to understand the lyrics.
“It’s a matter of sound, melody, but also of Italianness, because being Italian is a plus there. I once played in Tokyo and I remember the Japanese audience listening with their eyes closed, they seemed to understand everything, although obviously not understanding a single word.”
Your first experiences abroad?
“In 2002, after the collaboration phase with Pino Daniele, having no record outlets, I founded my own record company (Microcosmo) and that was part of my fortune. Because thanks to independence, speaking of niche, it gave me the opportunity to publish my music in other countries too. From publication to being invited abroad, the step was short.”
In the early 2000s, opening a record company at just thirty years of age, without large amounts of capital, was not at all obvious, nor above all simple.
“It was a beautiful step also because I took it in the company of my best friend and my brother. There was really a desire to share. Record company, among other things, still exists, the same one that continues to publish my music.
When on the one hand you are not kissed by large numbers or large media exposure, an expressive freedom is triggered that you can continue to cultivate without conditioning, and the desire to build something remains intact, not to travel on autopilot, but to always be very present to yourself, to what you do, for better or for worse. That’s the good thing about being independent. And at a certain point the problem of numbers no longer arises. When you encounter the pleasure, the taste of someone who was looking for exactly what you created and create, the circle closes and everything works.”
Borrowing Kant’s words, you tell us that the starry sky above us is intimately connected to the constellation of feelings we carry within us. And “Big Bang” is the story of it.
“This is an almost playful record, I had a lot of fun making it. You know, after more than thirty years in the profession, it becomes even more important that the pure entertainment component is constantly nourished.
I have always done concerts in which what was played on stage was partly invented. With this album and this tour this component is exalted. On stage I will be accompanied by the same musicians with whom I made the album, who have been playing with me for several years. We are a quartet that mixes soul, funk, and South American sounds. This apparently heterogeneous mixture has always given rise, especially now, to a fun but also introspective cohesion. Two aspects that seem unrelated, but in reality manage to coexist very well.
After a long tour last summer, I’m looking forward to two more important milestones: on 4 December in Milan, at the Spazio Teatro 89, and on 17 December in Rome, at the Auditorium Parco della Musica.”
Thanks to a strong propensity for cinema, Joe Barbieri imagines a little film inside each of his songsand many of his titles, are precisely the result of this attitude.
One of the ten tracks on “Big Bang” is titled “Pisces Ascendant in Aquarius”, where he vocalizes: “From a Pisces Ascendant in Aquarius, You cannot expect less”.
Joe was born under the sign of Sagittarius, more or less accurately Scorpio ascendant, but certainly from him too one cannot expect anything less than a concert that is not only “live”, but also “musically and explosively alive”.
