The new album by Giovanni Truppi, in search of happiness

Lord Byron said that the memory of happiness is no longer happiness, while the memory of pain always remains pain. But that intolerant dandy was born crippled on the “narrow island” across the Channel, and perhaps this had the weight of him. Listening Infinite possibilities for finite beingsthe new album by Giovanni Truppiit doesn’t seem like that at all. Happiness is also in his memory, made up of little things: the cat giving birth, your girlfriend’s curls through the glass of a swimming pool, a day without anything to do with the storm behind you. They are moments, fragments. And Truppi has the gift, the one possessed by certain poets with a less dark charm than Byron, of simplicity. It is enough for him to tell us how he imagines it – “with wings” and “full of mercy, with no one to beat and nothing to declare, clear, like the arrival of summer time” – and there it is, happiness. The memory of a moment thickens at the bottom of the stomach. “When you talk about it too much it fades away. It works much better to stick around,” says Truppi. “So remembering is more reliable than hearing: it’s a certificate. By my nature and profession I find myself dealing with memories, thinking that it’s nice to put them aside, a little like wood for the winter”.

There is a subtle nostalgia that warms up in this disc, which he defines as an equation (or an enigma) whose solution is life. A concept album at the time of singles: out of the ordinary like its author, one of the best of his generation. Neapolitan on the run (“I miss the powerful dimension of that city. The Scudetto? I’d love to but I don’t like football”). After a long stay in the (former) Roman village of Centocelle – of which he liked everything, he says, the low houses and the nearby sky – Truppi has been living in Bologna for four years, for love. And he sings: And already I feel used to another life. And sometimes I walk and smell the perfume my first girlfriend used on someone who passes by. And it seems to me that the past mixes with the present. A journey into space – enriched by environmental recordings; chatter, car horn, children’s voices – and in the mind of the songwriter, in the flow of thoughts and uncertainties of someone who has just turned forty. “A stage that made me more performance anxious before, when I felt it coming and wanted to find the answers. Now I’m more comfortable with being filled with doubts.” Among them those concerning privilege and the sense of guilt, “the real co-author of the album”, he says, produced with Marco Buccelli and Niccolò Contessa (I Cani). “He and his uselessness: it’s a great force of gravity that keeps you still, the sense of guilt”.

And then also the commitment, how one lives in a community. “The record ends with a series of unavoidable but unanswered questions. The mere fact of asking them, however, makes you tend towards something”. In one passage, Truppi also brings up the Democratic Party: he proposes to climb it. The structure is there, the premises as well, already rented. Slowly we take it from hand to these and try to understand. After the Schein effect, the Truppi effect. “It’s a provocation, but I ask this of a party: more opportunities to build community”.

And then there is the theme of our finiteness, the relationship with death, “the great removal of our era brought back into our lives by war and disease. My job is to intercept things inside and outside of me: and here it is”. Did you at least quit smoking or do you keep promising “I’ll quit again”? “I quit! This week is a year.” We are born and die, seeking happiness.

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• Henry Cicchetti

• Born in the lands of Virgil in a sultry September of 1987, he seeks refreshment in those of Aeneas. Al Foglio since 2016. He is @e_cicchetti on Twitter