CD Version Available April 2021
Canvas Two is my 10th solo album. It is not a concept album: like the previous Canvas One, it arises from the need to collect rearranged material for the Samurai of Prog universe with new original songs, or rearrangements of old songs released in previous albums.
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It consists of 8 tracks, two of which are instrumental which open and close the album.
Soul of Hundred Lives
What if the soul was a parasite? A living being that in order to live must infest other living beings, in this case man? Starting from this bizarre idea, I imagined the existence of one of these souls that passes from body to body, and which however has a defect: it keeps the memory of past lives. Every human being he infests, when he reaches a certain age, begins to remember all the past lives, the other human beings in which he lived. Understandably, this confuses the person, who remembers loves, events, joys and pains of past lives, and makes the present life an infinite challenge made up of compromises and impossibilities: it's hard to be honest with those you love, for example.
King of Spades
When Marco Bernard asked me for a piece for a future Samurai work and gave me 5 minutes as a target lenght, I immediately thought of a series of arpeggiated and delicate chords and a love story between two playing cards in a rigged deck. I am passionate about magic games, so it was fun to imagine the story of a King of Spades in one of those decks of cards that are used for only one game, always the same. And in this game the King always happens to be near the Queen of Clubs but from the back, so that she can never even see him. He is in love, but love is impossible. One day the magician makes a mistake and the two cards come face to face, they fall in love and live the love of their life for a few moments. The King of Spades returns to the darkness of the box, hoping that the magician will make the same mistake in the future in order to see his queen again.
Why Me
Sometimes things happen to us that we would never want to experience, and we ask ourselves "why me?". And sometimes we also realize that it is the most selfish question we can ask ourselves: nevertheless we cannot help but ask it.
Abby's Escape
When I thought about what I would have liked to tell in one piece, I imagined a little girl who, in order to survive the family violence of a violent father, had begun to transform sounds into colors, and images into sounds. A primal instinct, a system to grow without going crazy, a way to endure what a child can neither understand nor metabolize.
White Skies
This piece, written at the time of Dreaming Tony Banks, although originally instrumental has always been thought of as a sung piece. When it was recorded, in 2014, my technical means were very poor and this is felt above all in the rhythm sections and in the sounds and drum arrangements. Today things have improved a bit, so I thought it would be nice to take it back and put it back together again. I admit that the text is a bit cryptic but basically it speaks of the fact that sometimes we have to deal with multiple versions of ourselves, as if we had different souls inside and not just one. I could relate the discourse to the one introduced in Soul of Hundred Lives, but I leave the pleasure of making these hypotheses to the listener.
The Knight and the Ghost
One of the recurring themes of my lyrics is that of impossible love. This piece was asked me by Marco Bernard for his new folk-prog creature The Guildmaster. For this reason I dropped the subject in the medieval world, and I imagined an unfortunate knight who lives the love story of his life in an indefinite past. Something has obviously gone wrong and we find him endlessly reliving, as if he were a character in an elaborate music box, his desperate attempt to put things right. His frantic gallop towards the rendezvous with destiny that he already knows is a failure is relived always the same, with hope in his heart and the certainty of failure in his head.