Una storia sbagliata (song)

"Una storia sbagliata"
Cover art for the single
Single by Fabrizio De André
B-side	"Titti"
Released	1980
Recorded	1980
Genre	Folk rock, singer-songwriter
Length	5:28
Label	Dischi Ricordi
Songwriter(s)	Fabrizio De André, Massimo Bubola
Producer(s)	Mark Harris, Oscar Prudente

"Una storia sbagliata" (b/w "Titti") is a single written and performed by Italian singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André and co-composed with folk songwriter Massimo Bubola. This selection of songs was recorded at the start of sessions for De André's self-titled 1981 album (also known as L'Indiano) and first released in 1980 as a standalone single. In 1999, "Una storia sbagliata" was re-released within the Fabrizio De André: Opere complete box set. "Titti" had its first CD release in 2005, within the greatest hits and rarities collection In direzione ostinata e contraria.

Track listing

1. "Una storia sbagliata" ["A wrong story"] (Fabrizio De André/Massimo Bubola) – 5:28
2. "Titti" (Bubola/De André) – 4:47

The songs

"Una storia sbagliata"

"Una storia sbagliata" (literally "A wrong story", but also translated as "A story in error" or "A story full of mistakes") is an impassioned folk rock song in ⁶
₈ time, set at a lento (= slow) tempo of about 57 BPM (in tuplets), featuring an arrangement led by layered acoustic and electric strummed guitars, and mostly sung in close harmony by De André and co-writer Bubola. Written on a commission from RAI as an end-credits song for the 1980 documentary Dietro il processo ("Behind the trial") by journalist Franco Biancacci, it is a topical song about the mysterious, unsolved 1975 murder of writer, poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini. (Ennio Morricone wrote original music for the documentary.) The lyrics do not specifically talk about the event but, refer to it as a forgettable, untold, complex, peripheral, unfinished, black-coloured, badly covered-up, disgraced and ultimately wrong story. All of the above adjectives, and more, are used in the verses of the song one at a time; each of them is used in a single anaphoric line as an attribute to "story", while the chorus refers to the story itself as being either a different one for ordinary people or as an ordinary one for special people. In the second chorus, "story" is replaced by "night", and the choruses also mention two lives having been tainted, hit and sculpted by heaven. According to an interview with Bubola in the final DVD (Poesia in forma di canzone – "Poetry as songs") of the 8-DVD 2011 documentary series Dentro Faber (about De André's life and career – Faber being his nickname), he and De André accurately chose the word "Heaven", instead of "God", in order not to involve a religious vision into the song, something on which De André was not keen. Bubola also explained the "two lives" line as a reference to the fact that the original RAI documentary (for which the song was written) was also about the unsolved murder of 21-year-old aspiring actress Wilma Montesi.

"Titti"

Totally different in mood from the A-side, "Titti" [an Italian shortening for the female names Tiziana or Elisabetta] is a happy-sounding Tejano song, set in ⁴
₄ time at an allegro moderato tempo of about 120 BPM and again featuring acoustic strummed guitars as the basis of its arrangement (similarly to "Andrea", from Rimini, but harsher and less melodic than its predecessor). The lyrics are mostly whimsical and, except for the chorus, do not tell a consistent story. Indeed, the titular Titti appears only in the chorus, which was freely inspired by Jorge Amado's 1966 fantasy novel Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands. In a very lightweight tone, De André sings about a carefree woman named Titti who "had two loves, one of heaven, one of earth; of opposite sign, one of peace, one of war." In the second half of the chorus, "one on earth, one in heaven, [...] a good one, a true one". The verses, on the other hand, consist in a series of unconnected images about pairs (or couples) of objects and people, each pair/couple being linked only by a common object or a common place. Two such lines, "And it was two wooden beams which made up the cross/and, around it, two bandits with the same voice", may be read as a biblical reference to the two thieves crucified alongside Jesus. The song is one of De André's lesser-known ones in his entire discography: he has always considered it very irrelevant, he has never engaged in any promotion at all regarding it, and he has never even commented on it. Co-writer Bubola, however, on Dentro Faber, mentioned it en passant as "just a B-side", and explained that the name "Titti" was preferred to his original choice of "Flora" – from the title of Amado's novel – as "Titti" had a more percussive sound (thus fitting better into the music of the song and its chorus), without caring at all about any possible significance of either name.

Personnel

According to Bubola, both sides of the single feature unspecified members of Premiata Forneria Marconi and New Trolls, in what the songwriter referred to as "a sort of jam session".