It often happens among musicians, writers or simple bored thinkers that we get together to ask questions that, in the obviousness of our knowledge, appear banal. You will think it is an effect of nullity. However, for an artist, similar practices are like fertilizers for ideas waiting to sprout. In the abecedary of questions that are thought to have exhaustive and prepackaged answers we find the following: who can be defined as a singer-songwriter?
What is a songwriter?
What is a singer-songwriter already? the vocabulary, suggests to me how much by Singer-Author are meant those who are indicated as pop music singers who are also authors of the lyrics of the songs they interpret. For real? Is this a songwriter? That is, it is enough to write a riot of verses in kissed rhyme, sing them and voilà here is a singer-songwriter? So let's do a test:
My name is none other than Carlo
I have a wooden snout in which a Woodworm lives
Don't these lines make sense? I don't need to talk
Because to be songwriters, it takes little to prove it
Is it done? Was this just enough to ensure that I was crowned singer-songwriter? But what a hard work a Francesco Guccini, when he wrote The Locomotive: 65 lines for an author's song, when with 4 it would have been the same thing! maybe she ignored it. Or maybe the song is something else. Here we go again: what is the song? This is not a question that receives obvious answers, especially for us Italians.
The Italian Song
Why should the song be so important for us Italians? Simply, because the Italian song is the most ancient metric form of the art lyric in Italian literature; and it was Dante Alighieri who defined its first laws, defining it "the highest form of vulgar poetry". This certifiable reality does nothing but open files of Italian literature in which we find innumerable names of illustrious singers in columns. Starting with Francesco Petrarca himself with his Petrarchsca.
All right, then? Does that mean we don't have to write songs unless we have laurel wreaths on our heads? That's not the point. The question revolves around the label of which some often make improper use and abuse in order to sublimate the value of their compositions.
It is evident how much the term singer-songwriter does not deserve an exclusive etymological attention; but it requires, for those who dress it on himself, a particular attention that takes into account the artistic history that lies behind these ten letters. Being songwriters is a cultural fact that cannot be entrenched within a didactic definition; but it must be a reason for literary research, for life, for passions that cannot bow to the expressive (or repressive) dogmas of the hits in vogue. Being songwriters is equivalent to taking on the weight of past artistic expression, so that it is carried out with cultural dignity; for the same reasons, being a songwriter means carrying on a principle of moral responsibility and respect towards music, but above all, towards the song.
In conclusion, to clarify, the four verses written above are really composed by the undersigned. But believe me: I'm not a songwriter. I can only try to explain that the melodic tune I thought was really nice. I swear!
