It is fire that is the recurring image in Vasco Brondi's latest album, Un segno di vita (released on Carosello Records on 15 March 2024). Fire runs through the lyrics, the track titles, the dazzling red of the cover. And it has a great deal to do with the deeper meaning the singer-songwriter from Ferrara attributes to his own work. "Italo Calvino says it is important to 'seek and know how to recognise who and what, in the midst of hell, is not hell, and make it last, and give it space'. Even when times seem darkest, the way to face them is simply to live through them, to enter into them trustingly and lighten them with our presence. I believe that songs, too, can be signs of life, fires in the night," he tells us as he introduces his latest work.

Ma Sara sfonderà tutte le porte
e la fame, la sete di vita, un vecchio pianoforte.
E poi sentirà ancora un fuoco dentro,
un fuoco che brucia, ma illumina tutto.

Illumina tutto, Vasco Brondi

Ten tracks – though many more were in the works, he reveals, joking that the album is a kind of "best of" – which will probably be received with a certain surprise by fans of the very earliest releases from his former project Le luci della centrale elettrica, so spare, angry, raw. But also by those who had appreciated Paesaggio dopo la battaglia (2021), preceded by a five-minute spoken single (Chitarra nera), without metre. In Un segno di vita, Vasco Brondi does the exact opposite. "I worked on what felt fundamental to me, which is the song form — with rhythms, choruses. After all, the great masters — I think for example of Franco Battiato, Francesco de Gregori and Fabrizio De André — always stayed within the three-and-a-half-minute song form. There was an additional effort of simplification: reaching the essential takes more work," he explains. We interviewed him.

One of the choices every artist has to make, especially at such a particular historical moment, is how much to let the events of the world into their songs. What formula have you found?
There really is no formula. Even after 15 years, I've realised I don't have a method — but perhaps that's also the most interesting thing about this work. I've simply noticed that what matters to me in songs is that everything is in there: the complexity and the short-circuits of the world, love, war. In hindsight, I've understood that these are songs "of love and apocalypse," as Nada put it when I brought her on board; but they are always set — and perhaps this is where the apocalypse lies — in a social, cultural and environmental context.

Tom Waits used to say that before writing a song he has to picture the person he's writing about — what books they have on their bedside table, whether the sun is out or it's raining. Perhaps those details won't make it explicitly into the track, but he has to imagine them. For me, maybe, it's something like that. Then, living through these times, I think it's important for me partly to celebrate them and partly to try to make some sense of them; and writing songs is my way of trying to make some sense of them. At the same time, though, it's important to keep the universal in mind — that these should be songs that carry the breath of the present but also a spark of eternity, "the laws of the city and the laws of the universe."

You closed "Paesaggio dopo la battaglia" with "Siamo solo due forme di vita sul terzo pianeta del sistema solare." In "Un segno di vita" you speak of a future in which all that remains of human civilisation are ruins and nature has reclaimed its spaces. Does this idea of the human being as so small, immersed in an all-powerful nature, frighten you or reassure you? More broadly, what role does nature play in your creative process?
The fact that nature is so overwhelming and puts us back in our proper proportion — meaning minuscule — I think does us a great deal of good. Even though we live in these cities made by human beings for human beings, where we have done everything possible to drive nature out. Here in Milan there aren't even pigeons any more, but you only have to head out in any direction to find yourself in the middle of a wood. Perhaps that's why we recorded part of the album at Paolo Cognetti's house at 2,500 metres; paradoxically, it's just over two hours from here but it feels like being on another planet. The songs are very transparent, so I think that in some way something of having recorded them in the middle of the woods "got in."

It makes me smile how humans look at nature believing they are not part of it, when in fact we are made of the same elements scattered through the air that in us assemble to create a human body, and elsewhere — being the very same elements — become something else. In our society you have to pretend otherwise: in summer and in winter you have to perform equally, by day and by night you have to perform equally, whether you've just experienced a birth or a death you have to perform equally. And yet you don't perform equally. And that is why we are struggling as a species — because we no longer believe we are inside the "wonderful fabric of everything." That's the title of a book by a botanist, Robin Wall Kimmerer, which speaks of the loneliness of the species, something that afflicts only human beings: we know everything about human affairs but we don't know the names of the plants around us or of the birds we hear singing. This causes us distress, because it's like not being able to read road signs. We are alone.

The poet Chandra Candiani went to live with her partner in the middle of the woods. At first she felt lonely, but after a while she realised that the world around her was full of life; it simply wasn't the human life of cities but that of birds, animals, plants. In short, it doesn't crush me that nature puts us back in our proper proportion, because it will do so more and more. We have been on planet Earth as a species for 350,000 years; a pineapple has been here for 5 million years. As the neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso says, we will need to survive at least as long as other species before we can consider ourselves equally intelligent. If instead we are wiped out sooner, so be it. But I believe the only thing we can do is learn, by looking this reality in the face.

In "Illumina tutto" you sing "c'è vita al di là degli schermi"; in the past you wrote "Iperconnessi." Like it or not, screens are the windows through which we discover what is happening, through which we work, through which you artists channel your music. How do you live with this tension — as an artist and as a citizen — the sense that one cannot do without the digital and yet at the same time feels the need to go beyond it?
I have to say that, for me, it really is still a tension. Generationally, I grew up and formed myself primarily on this side of the screen. I read that it's wrong to divide virtual life from real life, but my brain hasn't yet undergone the anthropological shift that perhaps the generations younger than mine have experienced. I'm something of a Mormon when it comes to using social networks and phones — I don't like the fact that they were built with behavioural psychologists to act on human compulsiveness. When I can, it feels like carving out a space of freedom when I turn my phone off in the evening and switch it back on late in the morning.

Then, I feel more and more the power of live concerts. It seems to me that in this society — which on the one hand is secularised (and therefore without rituals of any kind) and on the other is accustomed to the screen — gathering together in the same place at the same moment is becoming ever more potent. I'm convinced that certain things continue to be antidotes: seeing each other, going to places, sensing what that place smells like, what that person smells like. It's something that still matters a great deal to me.