“El Olvido - Mexico City Sessions” is a collection of three songs I recorded in Mexico City in 2017 and 2019 during live studio sessions.

I spent a total of about 6 months of my life in Mexico, distributed in three trips in which I got to know and absorb some parts of the megalopolis, a bit of desert, a bit of forest, some pueblos, some pyramids, I got to make connections with some interesting people, I did some hitchhiking on the road…
The list goes on, and describing Mexico and the influence it had on me is very hard and maybe out of place in the description of an EP.
But these three songs are definitely the product of what I witnessed and learned during my time in Mexico, a country that’s at once so different and so similar from my country of origin, Italy.
A certain poetic and fatalistic approach to life and death, a symbolic perception of all the aspects of the world, a strong emphasis on rhythm as the engine of our mundane and spiritual lives…
These are all things that I somehow absorbed while being in Mexico, and that constitute the essence of these songs.

The opening track is based on “El Árbol Que Tú Olvidaste”, an incredibly beautiful song by the Argentinian musician and poet Atahualpa Yupanqui.
I completely rewrote the music and adapted the wonderful lyrics from Spanish to English.
I tried to make the song my own, maintaining the outmost respect for its writer and his creation.

The following song, “La Nada Raudal”, is my first experiment with writing lyrics in Spanish. I let the expressive and symbolic traits of the language dictate the direction of the music, and these are the results of this linguistic, musical and emotional search.
Part of it was written on the rooftop of the building I was staying at in Mexico City, where I could see most of the city’s skyline. An unforgettable landscape. I would go up there with my guitar, playing and writing at nightfall. And part of it was written during a long car trip with Fernando, the bass player. We were going from Mexico City to Guadalajara to talk with a producer. The collaboration didn’t happen but the trip was inspiring and earned me a few lines of this song.
Reading a couple of Jorge Luis Borges books in their original language also inspired me a lot.

The closing track is a departure from the intimate and intense atmosphere of the previous songs, going in a more playful and groovy direction, albeit proggier.
I wrote the bulk of it in Rome years prior, and used it as an instrumental opener for my gigs.
But it was during my stay in Mexico in 2017 that it took its final form, this time in the southern state of Yucatan. That’s when I added some of its most interesting riffs and gave the song a full band treatment with the collaboration of the musicians of the Orquesta Vulgar, a very compelling band from Mexico City.