Bitten by a…what?!
Preface
These pages are about a musical project – a long overdue musical project.
I tried not to play music for a few years, I almost tried to deny that part of my personality for quite some time. It doesn’t work. Music is stronger than us, it has its own design to complete. It happens to us – or through us.
Music bites.
As always, I am not alone – my songs are not a “solo” effort. There are the ones who play with me, the ones who share their ideas with me, the ones who wait for me to stop playing about and spend some time with them.
All of us are
Bitten by an ape.
The Band? What band?
The band is essentially me and Loz (Lorenzo Salvagni).
I write the songs in a rough form, send them to Loz who then starts the arrangement process. When he feels there is enough “meat” around the basic idea, he sends the songs back to me (have I mentioned the fact that he lives in Cleveland, Ohio, and I live in Dublin, Ireland?). From then on a song shuttles back and forth between him and me a number of times, until we are both satisfied enough with the result.
That’s how we’ve put together the eight songs we are currently working on.
Loz and I go back a good few years: we both grew up in the hundred-and-ten-thousand people strong town of Latina, about 60km south of Rome – although neither of us was born there. We met in our twenties (OK, let me clarify: we’re only in our thirties now…) and only realized then that we had attended the same school and lived not more than 300 metres apart.
We started our musical voyage in a band called Hype, playing our own sort of brit-pop inspired rock with me on the bass. The band was the brainchild of Gianni Santoro, singer/songwriter, who then moved on to become a journalist for the italian magazine XL.
The five piece band became a trio after a while (look at us), then finally disbanded: Gianni moved to Rome, I moved to Dublin and Loz roamed the length of Italy before landing a scholarship in Cleveland, OH (currently in Chapel Hill, NC).
After moving to Dublin where I had found a proper job, I basically stopped playing in public: I thought I had had my chances already – time to turn the page.
But after a few years, as mentioned earlier, music crept back behind me: I joined a Dublin band called Audium. We had fun and we played some very nice places, including POD in Dublin and The Academy in Manchester (plus a most bizarre appearance at the American Ambassador’s party in Galway!).
When Audium disbanded I felt it was time for me to concentrate on my own music: I dug out of the closet a few songs I had written in the past years and started working on brand new ones.
Re-enter Loz…
The rest you pretty much know, if you follow this blog.
…to be continued…
What’s in a name
A few years ago an italian colleague and friend of mine, who was living in Ireland at the time, one day got stung by a bee. He went to see a doctor – an Irish doctor, of course – who asked him what had happened. My friend told him without hesitation he had been bitten (as in bitten by an insect).
“Bitten by what?” the doctor enquired.
“By a…a…” stuttered my friend struggling to find the right term, then finally finding it “I have been bitten by an ape!”.
“An ape?!” the doctor almost fell from his chair…
Well, you see, the italian word for bee is ape (pron. ah-peh). A typical case of linguistic false friend, but a very funny one, methinks.
Some time later I was telling the anecdote to another friend of mine, who is an Art Director for an advertisement company in Italy – and he couldn’t stop laughing. I guess he sort of convinced me that Bitten by an ape would make a good name for a band/project/product/brand/what-have-you.
I think he was right.
So here we are.
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