ERMAL META 6 ph colajemma (2026
Ermal Meta returns to the Sanremo Festival with Star Star and an upcoming album “Vital Functions”.
Ermal Meta returns to Sanremo, five years later A million things to tell you. Five years of touring, songs, audiences, fatherhood. Five years of life.
I am very happy to participate in the Festival this year. The song I bring to the race helps increase the emotional weight I carry with me. I thought about it and also the fact that it's my first Sanremo as a dad maybe changes something. It's as if there was an extra degree of responsibility, even simply for the way of supporting that week and the stage.
Time is a deception sang with La Fame di Camilla in A man and time is the oxymoron but also the thread that runs throughout the album.”Vital Functions” out on February 27th. Melancholy, nostalgia, adolescence, life. An always bright gaze, sometimes more disenchanted, sometimes dreamy, certainly a more than valid point of view for those who feed on music. He returns with a song that certainly doesn't wink but, when listened to, tells the story of the war without ever falling into the banal with vivid references and images.
How it was born Star Star?
The song is about a little girl from Gaza. A nameless little girl, who belongs to a voiceless people. It's strange because they are a people on everyone's lips, but forgotten and it's a crazy oxymoron. Even the way I wrote this song was very particular because I was there with the guitar I was playing in Fortuna, I was singing something that had to do with Star Starexcept that a few hours earlier I had found myself looking at some very strong images. I still remember the look of that little girl from Gaza in that video, it pierced me in a significant way. I went down to the studio and found myself singing that melody that I had invented for my daughter Futura, singing those words there, but with a different intention because I had the look of that video before my eyes. Within a quarter of an hour I wrote this song. I remained in a popular context because it talks about a people. The melodic tradition of popular song carries within itself this circularity. All popular songs have been handed down because they enter people's DNA. I kept that nursery rhyme there, that circular melody. I put myself in the shoes of an adult: how do you explain what is happening to a child? It immediately struck me as a song that had a specific weight different from the others. Listening to it with Carlo (Conti) it seemed the most right to us.
Listening to the album, however, it is certainly not the simplest.
A month earlier, I had written a piece about my daughter. But I thought that this is the time to also talk about other people's children, who are children of all of us. Expand a little on what I'm talking about. Vital Functions it is a record that is crossed by the theme of time. Time as nostalgia, as loyalty to what you have been, but also as deception, because time is. It represents a different version of you than you were, the past changes depending on what you decide to highlight, so don't listen to it too much. The title track, in fact, tells exactly about this, it is a dialogue in which I talk to a version of me from the past. In fact, in closing I say “The past comes, knocks on the door don't open this time”because you will be deceived once again. In the last two years I have severed some ties that tied me to the past. I have let go of some things, I have left space for what is to come.
There is also another song that is perhaps related to war on the album: Droni.
Droni is a kind of song from the future. I tried to imagine, also to avoid a dystopian future of this sky darkened by drones. In the song I didn't say with certainty that those drones will carry bombs, but “let's go and see if it's true?”, a question. This is in our hands. They say that when you paint a possible future, it tends not to come true, so to avoid that perhaps I wrote it. It's a song that wants to be a prelude to the album. There are questions on the record. Questions that remain open give a longer insight. in Drones as I was saying “let's go and see if it's true if we're safe”are we safe? A sense of hope, a light.
You return to the festival after five years. In these five years everything has happened and little has been said. All hell happened when it was mentioned, how are you preparing?
I think that an artist or rather a songwriter has one main task, which is to tell what he feels and not filter it. The moment he filters it he is doing something wrong. The moment you expose yourself, you expose yourself to everything and you must be able to defend what you do and when I go on an important stage I am ready to do anything to defend what I believe in, what I see, also because until proven otherwise the Constitution guarantees me the right to speak and I want to use this right to speak. I prefer to say what I feel. In 2017 I brought a song that had a theme of a certain type and I got called a pimp, the same in 2018. A bit like the saying “If you're beautiful they'll throw stones at you, if you're ugly they'll throw stones at you”. When I was little and had just arrived in Italy, I didn't understand the result of this song, then I understood it. Surely everything will come upon me but this doesn't interest me because my mission is another.
You used Dardust for the arrangement of Stella Stellina, why?
When I wrote this song, I had made an extremely organic outfit with horns. I didn't want it to feel like a story from the past, but something that's happening today. I called Dario, for me he is an extraordinary producer, he has a different mind from the others. He gave the song a crazy level up, while maintaining the coordinates of the piece, the arrangement was profoundly different. It was exactly what I had heard but was unable to put into sound because I was looking at the painting too closely.
Eurovision yes or no?
Given that I won't come close to winning, so the problem doesn't arise. I believe that there are many ways to protest, to express one's dissent: there is a boycott, turning one's back, silence. There is also going there, singing a song like that even more closely and putting it in his face even more. I say this because when the revolution broke out in Albania I was there and if all the people hadn't gone to the streets, nothing would have changed. I know what I saw, I was little but I remember it. It's legitimate to boycott, but it's equally legitimate to put your foot down and say I'm here and I sing this thing here and I want to do it, until it doesn't just stay here but can also get there. If I had a different song I don't know if I would have given this answer, but with this song it would be like not taking the last step, like not supporting the message to the end and I don't want to make this mistake, it would be a big mistake with this song. Then if they ask to change the text, I will never accept that. It is in silence that certain things thrive.
Does the tour start in May?
The club tour will start in May. I love clubs, I love them. They remind me of the times of La Fame di Camilla, when we played around with this van, which we called a van. When I enter a club I still feel like I belong to that band, it was a crazy school of life. Then there will certainly be some dates during the summer and certainly something in the autumn. At some point after a year of not writing anything, I have to write.
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