“You know what’s right? That no one gets to control where music goes.”
Andrea Laszlo De Simone’s songs have always gotten caught somewhere deep inside me. They’ve always taken hold of me and carried me far away, miles from wherever my feet happened to be planted, and strictly without asking for permission.
“There’s no point resisting it. Music goes where it needs to go; it belongs to everyone more than it belongs to me,” Andrea Laszlo De Simone says in a recent interview with Marie Claire.
And then he continues:
“Three days after I write a song, it feels as if someone else wrote it. I’m no longer the same person I was before. It’s right that the song belongs to everyone and, by the same logic, it’s right that I am wherever I want to be.”
I think back to that interview I read earlier as I put on my earphones and walk around the corner of my building.
The beauty of music is that it is free to go wherever it wants. Music is free to reach anyone’s resonating chamber, no one excluded, and to resonate within each person in a unique way.
Unique, because every human being sees life through colors entirely their own. Beyond everything that can be counted and measured, there exists the meaning we give to the things of this world.
Oh gosh, I was standing at a traffic light listening to the song “Non è reale”, and I found myself tearing up.
But how did that happen? I missed the green light. Now I have to wait for the next one.
But what does it matter, really?
As I was saying, this meaning that goes beyond appearances must be something uniquely and exclusively human. I couldn’t explain exactly what this deeply human thing is, but I have no doubt about where it is.
Because I’ve seen it.
It’s in your face, which I find more beautiful every day the more I care about you.
It’s in this heart that warms every time I walk down this street—outwardly just another street like any other—because it guards that tender memory from the end of winter so many years ago.
It’s in that rainy day I spent with you that somehow felt like the brightest day of all.
It’s in that evening we spent together, which I’m certain lasted for hours and yet, I swear, I swear, flew by in an instant.
Wow… so in the end, we’ve been living inside a poem as long as a lifetime and never even noticed.
But if living gives color to things, then I wonder: where exactly do we dip the brushes with which we paint the world? Where is our palette of colors?
As I ask myself all this, another song begins playing through my earphones.
It’s true: music goes where it needs to go.
“I have no doubt that another world exists
You only need to trust your eyes
Trust your eyes even when they close…”
Lucio Corsi has decided to come to my rescue, answering me the way only a true artist can. (To my rescue, yes—but certainly not to pull me back to shore.)
But now a doubt arises, and I slow my pace as I walk.
So then… what happens to someone who no longer believes in that other world?
What remains of that other world, the one we all possess because it is fundamentally human, yet unique within each of us?
In other words, what happens when a person loses their palette of colors?
“To me, a forest has become just a forest again”. The heartbreaking words Paolo Cognetti suddenly come back to me. “Silence has descended into the heart: the illness is being able to see only the surface side of reality.”
As I walk down the avenue, now filled with that golden light that only late-spring evenings at seven o’clock can offer, another song from the album “La gente che sogna” begins to play. Lucio Corsi decides to paint another magical image before my eyes:
“Certain footprints… are wounds upon the shore…”
And immediately my sounding board carries me toward a luminous feeling that I choose to follow as I drift farther and farther from home.
And I think that yes, it’s true. Some wounds can be so heavy and so deep that they imprint themselves on the skin like marks that seem indelible. And it’s true that a pickaxe can split a rock. It is even more true that what happened has happened, and that reality cannot simply be erased.
But that image also suggests something else to me: that we human beings live in two worlds, and that, just like us, the things that happen to us inhabit both.
This applies to everything, wounds included. Not by chance, many of them are invisible to the eye. They do not appear as tangible marks, and yet they hurt. They truly do.
But the two worlds are certainly not the same: that other world does not follow the rules of reason.
And perhaps, yes, it’s true that one wave is not enough to erase a wound. Maybe not even two.
But imagine another one arrived. And then another. Or, who knows, imagine that one day the tide unexpectedly rose.
“Attention!” — I can already imagine every news broadcast reporting it. — “Today the sea woke calm, but also swollen—enormous, unstoppable—and it is reclaiming the entire coastline! We never expected such a thing could happen! It goes against all common logic!”
Then, who knows, perhaps one ordinary morning you wake up and the wound, like a footprint, has disappeared into the sea.
And perhaps the split rock, thanks to water and the caresses of time, has become a smooth cliff—a beautiful one, the kind you can’t wait to dive from.
And perhaps all that land that suddenly dried out has become part of a colorful seabed. (And at that point, who even remembers that barren land from before? A seabed, after all, likes to change.)
So then, at this point, there’s only one question left:
How on earth do you make the sea grow larger?
Can I really do it on my own?
…There you are, finally.
I see you at the end of the street—and for a moment, it feels as though I’ve found an answer.
You wave at me and smile.
I smile back and walk toward you.
Adriana Ferretti
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