The desire to write first and then to play, the desire to be with the band in the studio and go on stage, the desire to express himself, far from strategies and calculations: Willie Pyote reasons following these paths, not always taken by those who make music Today. “On the riverbank” is the new project published by the Turin singer-songwriter and rapper, designed to accompany the series of live events which will take him with his band from May 25th throughout the summer around Italy. More than an EP, he explained, it is the first part of the album that will go to close the Savoy trilogy which began with “Educazione Sabauda” (2015) and continued with “Sindrome di Tôret” (2017). Peyote and the band recorded live and, both in sound and attitude, it was a return to the origins.
“On the river bank” doesn’t have a real concept behind it, but “the desire to make music that we like. I wanted to make music that I enjoyed writing, playing, recording. It’s more of a belly album than a head album, although obviously it’s not possible to completely remove the head from my life”, he continued. Then again: “It’s a record about the desire to make music, about the same and opposite reaction to the previous record (‘Pornostalgia’, ed.) which feels the influence of the tour and the music I listen to continuously, which has always stimulated me as Paolo Conte, Amy Winehouse and Arctic Monkeys”. This, according to Willie Peyote, is a record in the plural: written, played, produced by several hands together with his band, friends and musicians with whom he finds himself on stage every time: “We rehearsed the pieces before going into the studio to record them exactly like when we try to go on tour and the result was songs that changed in the studio thanks to the band. I’m very satisfied with the result, the pleasure I felt in making this album goes beyond the album itself, beyond the call of duty.” The release of “On the riverbank” arrived on April 25th to anticipate the release “Giorgia in the country that wonders”, the story of a love that never really ended, the one between a part of Italy and fascism. “Like when two ex-boyfriends meet again after a long time and find themselves still in love, like Italy and fascism. A spark is enough to rekindle the flame and make it burn again as it did then,” Willie Peyote said.
In addition to “Giorgia nel Paese che si marvel” the album contains “What do you do with it”: “It’s a song we worked on for a long time, a guitar riff with something sexy where the story of a relationship is based, but in this case it is an unbalanced relationship where on one side there are those who want something more and on the other those who agree to settle for crumbs so as not to lose the other”. It’s still: “On the river bank”, the reference to the Po, as a good Turin native, is obviously present, but in Peyote’s mind the river bank is not only that of his citybut more generally the banks of the rivers that cross the large Italian and international urban centers, from Rome to Paris and London, for example.
There is also “Good luck”, a piece that brings echoes of Paolo Conte to the ears, where the piano is very central in a noir atmosphere. She explained it like this: “Every time I have to go to the station I pass a gym and I find myself seeing people running while everyone can see them from outside. If on the one hand I found that situation absurd, on the other hand I envied their discipline, being so rigorous with themselves, which I am not at all.” “Piani” is the song that more than any other musically expresses the tribute to those vintage and soul sounds that range from Motown to Amy Winehouse and which Willie Peyote and his band have always loved to perform live: “it’s a piece of love, the lightest song on the album. We liked the idea of the sound dimension of a certain genre, a sonic dress, rather than a conceptual one.” Closing these first six songs is “Narciso”a song where, as in other previous pieces by Peyote, the fear of failure returns, the performance anxiety projected onto us by the performative society in which we live.
