I Testi
It seemed ineluctable to present our songs in written words, to be transparent, naked: we would like that the ones enjoying our music could also understand the genesis of each song, the implications, the settings were each “piece of ourselves” have grown, at times by progressive addition, other times by unexpected and sudden intuition.
Peace Of Mind
It is never a simple decision to choose the song that should open an album, especially if the album is so full of different evocations. But for Live Tropical Fish there was never any doubt, the answer was clear: “Peace of mind”, and for many reasons. First of all the ubiquitous tension of the 6/8 tempo creates a periodic roundness, penetrated by the fine and jazzy arrangements of the horns. This tempo is complex but still has the profound ability to attach itself to ones memory.
The band’s deep affinity with Deborah Jordan meant that she was able to understand the primal idea of the track, the melody and lyrics. The almost “orchestral” choirs that she wrote are perfectly in tune with the entire song.
The track’s landscape is a skyline, an embracing metropolis that can either be frenetic or soft and intimate, all you have to do is look closer. At times one can feel the pressure of urban tension, a sense of competition and individualism that can gobble us up, grind and squeeze us. In those moments we need to find our own private mental space, a space protected from the outside world.
Peace of mind becomes a clear synonym of this search for a stable balance: a reassuring mantra, whether in the confidence of our loneliness or immersed in a noisy crowd, which at times is joyous, other times threatening but always unavoidable.
Complete Me
A highly rhythmical impact track with a punch, a dedication to the legendary and charismatic Fela Kuti (the former title of the track was “Fela’s scream is freedom”). His music is a scream of self-determination and freedom and also speaks about “mother earth” Africa’s beating heart and the inarrestable beat of life.
A homage to afrobeat – the emblematically minimal guitar, imperial horns and weave of hypnotic rhythm – that doesn’t stop at a mere quotation: it stands out as a statement of Kuti the revolutionary musician, but also the incomprehensible leader, able to lead jazz-funk music to its deepest ethnic roots while the same time attacking multinational companies and the fratricidal African governments for their crimes and corruption.
Alison Crockett’s choice to build a very physical, sensual, almost explicitly erotic love song balances and filters the rhythm and structure’s strong commitment. Physicality of love becomes a weapon of great energetic power, and all this seizes and celebrates Fela’s irrepressible exuberance, histrionic, over-the-top, instinctive and deep nature.
It is a revolutionary and conscious sexual tone, in which Alison’s voice expresses all its natural enveloping power, with an unexpected impact compared to her usual expression and style.
Breathe Again
It is a love song, why deny it? A song in which Laurnea wrote suffered lyrics that speak of summer night’s memories and sunny days: love can leave us scarred, but can also give us unforgettable memories, like the simple gesture of breathing together, something that holds inside the feeling and the emotion of a lost love.
But when that love becomes suffocating you need to start to breathe again by yourself, begin your journey of loneliness, overtake pain without denying the sweet memories of the happy moments that will never come again, at least not with that same person.
This is a soft song, with a smooth soul, it will embrace and reassure you, but at the same time it will rise suddenly like an explosion of rediscovered pride and a long denied identity. The arrangement looks at P-Funk with a not so hidden bit of “Cosmic Slop”, Clinton-style. The energy that springs out at the finale leads to an enumeration of possibilities. Hope? Catharsis? Revenge? Or it’s simply time to turn the page?
Speak Easy and Listen
Nick Rolfe, legendary New York based singer and pianist (as well as actor, with Susan Sarandon and Ralph Fiennes) created the lyrics to an idea conceived by Live Tropical Fish, if you “speak easy and listen” more your life will be happier and so will your relations with others.
Lyrics that speak of brotherhood, comprehension, tolerance, respect and hope: for this reason Rolfe and the band dedicated this song to Barack Obama, well before his election rush.
Speaking less and simply, listening more to others... it can help in hoping for a better world: an old fashioned but simple recipe, confirming what even Thales of Myletus said: “Gods gifted men with 2 ears and one mouth in order to hear double and speak half”.
Nick and Live Tropical Fish settled their collaboration in order to guarantee the greatest balance between the contents, lyrics and music of an extremely natural and touching song. A wide, dense text, at times almost spoken: an enjoyable narration, but pondered, proud of its black music roots, from iconic Gil Scott Heron to the legendary Last Poets.
A dedication that has no intention of “losing its tenderness” or the fun of making music itself.
A Rather Uncomfortable Combination
A composition solidly based on the distinctive features of funk. This is demonstrated by the orthodox decision to choose a singer such as April Hill, a young and promising voice of black music (her first album was produced by Marlon Saunders).
After listening to this track a few times, deeper levels of meaning start to appear, helped by the powerful groove and strangely odd but compelling refrain: “A rather uncomfortable combination” is a quotation from Borges, from the short story “The Approach To Almotasin” (already in English in the original version).
It speaks to anyone that can preserve a feeling, in spite of an uncomfortable and sometimes unexplainable conjunction. It can be metaphysical (as in Borges), at times absolutely obvious, but nevertheless inextricable and ineluctable.
This song conjures the feeling one gets in a hall of mirrors at an amusement park: where what seems real isn’t and what is could be something different.
In all this anthology of inspirational figures at some point it is right to pay tribute to David Lynch, to dwarves and ballerinas and why not to “Freaks” by Todd Browning and Diane Arbus with her uneasy and disturbing shots.
But of course some will just stop and enjoy the funk, with its odd chorus perhaps almost Zappa-style... and that’s fine too.
Double Dream
The “Double”, the other side of the coin, the visceral, indestructible bond that twins have: living the same dream with different eyes.
The story told in “Double Dream” was influenced by the memorable writings by Schnitzler, or from the excellent reinterpretation by Stanley Kubrick in “Eyes Wide Shut”.
When love torments it brings us close together, culminating a shared vision where we can lose ourselves. The dreamers become one with this ecstatic vision. But can love be forever?
Change can occur quickly and that same dream can evolve into a nightmare, a yell of pain, especially if the distance and break up is unavoidable and unwanted.
This is the double soul of the track: two songs in one, “modular”, complementary, or separately enjoyable. The melodic approach catches you unprepared, because suddenly it opens up to unexpected horizons.
But have no fear, if you’ve had enough Pindaric flights, all you have to do is taste this song, alone or in the warmth of a hug, dreaming that the love story you’re living will never see the words “the end”.
Run and Hide
A bizarre union, an unusual encounter, a delightful obstacle: the “roundness” of the odd tempo is back. Once again you will find an afrobeat arrangement, coupled with a pinch of tainted jazz.
Enter the super chic trumpet played by Fabio Morgera, playing a game of hide and seek with Deborah Jordan’s voice, more velvety than ever and, when you are not expecting it, the vital beat of the congas join the game.
In this transparent game anything can go wrong, but nothing does and in the end everything restores to its natural place. After all it’s great to just get carried away by a song, stroll on the edge of non-sense, frivolity often helps, it doesn’t always cure, but it helps. So why not let yourself go, spinning around with your arms spread open like a spinning dervish with his eyes to the sky. No, wait, it’s you, just you, and you’re dancing barefoot in the grass.
Rubber Soul
There is a Latin soul in the Tropical Fish. Horns and percussion happily chase each other, we are all called to choose the end by ourselves, everyone personally, you simply have to want it and to be able to do it. In a day where everything seems to go wrong you need a great strength and a mission: we have to be able to change our point of view.
Rubber Soul takes its name from the famous Beatles’ album (that only bears the name, there is no homonym song in the album), but then dares so much more: in this track the concept is in between the lines, not always outspoken. Every once in a while it’s good to let things just bump into our “rubber soul” - not in order to avoid responsibilities or to keep on floating consciously on the surface – but in order to approach life and its harshness with the right amount of self-irony which can eventually be therapeutic. Trying to avoid cosmic blues and negativity (like self-prophecies that most of the time come true) is the only licit way of surviving, or simply live better, the panacea that wins over both a small pain and a great intolerance. And if at some point you can’t take it any longer you can always catch a flight south-bound...
And if you add Fabio Morgera’s trumpet and Omar’s extraordinary interpretation (the real prince of modern soul, Stevie Wonder in person chose him as his artistic partner) then... everyone is taken by hand and is free to take a break, to dance without hesitation.
Every once in a while you have to be the referee of the match you play with yourself and with others. This is why the finale of the song gives an array of circumstances, a catalogue of emotions of the rubber soul that can cure you. In fact this could go on endlessly. So... why don’t you write the next verse?
Slide Away
This was the first song of the new album that was completed. The evocative potential of the music immediately generated the right drive to suffered and suffering lyrics. The conflict between two persons, probably two lovers, becomes a day after day, hour after hour lingering and dragging ourselves, in days of “ghosts and crows” (and quoting Edgar Allan Poe is almost ineluctable).
This track is most likely to be the darkest and most nocturnal of the album, uncomplainingly submissive to mutual abandon, which becomes unavoidable, desirable, a sensation that has been postponed too long. And yet even in this necessary change, you can see a dim ray of light, that walks with you to show, by the musically epic resolution of the song, the hope of calm and rebirth.
It doesn’t matter what happened, it’s simply time to go, without further sensation. The time of discussion, of screaming and shouting is gone, now it’s time to answer the request of silence, “slide away now” like the chorus keeps on reminding you, almost like in a modern litany of peace.
It’s all about day-to-day intolerance, supported by the pulse of the rhythmic musical articulation and a clearly afro arrangement of the horns, along with an almost symphonic emphasis and a Latin evolution, which leads to hope and dips us into the fate of an unavoidable pain, and to its inevitable cure for redemption when the pain is overcome. That’s how the healing power of rhythm and the afro-Latin shamanism cures and heals all the wounds in the text, like in a novel by Marquez or Jorge Amado.
Alison Crockett’s voice finds here its innermost afro-black soul, and reveals its extraordinary gifts of energy and power.
Believe
Deborah Jordan’s smooth voice speaks the language of the soul. That “soul’s code” of R&B that can fill places and faces, opening up to more subtle and hypnotic feelings.
Everything appears more ”cushioned” and painless, like when snow is falling with its softening effect on noises and perceptions, reflecting in return every spot of light in a whiteness that cancels all judgements. Then it’s time to have faith, it’s time to believe that everything is possible, to believe in the person you have chosen as your partner in life.
In private it’s an intimate and confidential love, though it’s also the lights turning on at night in a cafe in No.li.ta. It’s about flowing words and long sips of wine or silences in which the two main characters of this song combine and come together.
Music wraps you up and protects you, and at the end of the game the best thing to do is to let yourself go.
I'm Tired
Very influenced by spiritual black jazz from the 70's (an era full of creative impulse, in which there were no bonds and no fear of experimenting new paths), streaked with r&b and funk, this piece speaks about the irreparable damage of a finished love story.
Rhythmic and horns drag you to the inevitable separation, while Laurnea's voice rises like an irrepressible cry of pain. Endurance becomes an explosive force. The mix between lead voice and choirs may sound confusing at first: the solo voice, like in the greek theather tradition becomes a polyphonic choir that makes emotions grow wider, the main character's despair embodies common pain, that is winding and real.
Fallacious havens of peace (the unexpected swing insert) fan the flames, rage rises, “taranta”-like representations emphasize the drama in this consciously harsh, unconventional and misplacing song, a layered sound suitable for fervent connoisseurs or for people that have no prejudices and are used to listening to different types of music.
Rising BIble
It's a biblical wisdom that merges with a non-orthodox spiritualism, far-sighted, tolerant. It's the rising sun of the culture of respect, of faith in creation's unstoppable energy, that individual creativity that any spiritual or temporal fundamentalism will always, in vain, try to stop.
It's an obsessive rhythm, ritual, shamanic, that supports the guitar’s electrified lyricism – which has famous ancestors but at the same time with an original and new feeling. A seemingly intellectual song that hammers with funk black energy, brilliantly performed by Maya Azucena's sensual voice.
It's a simple yet powerful message: wisdom lies in everyone's heart, it is the creative power of love that no hypocrisy could ever stop. All you have to keep in mind is that our fate is in our own hands.