Why do I write songs? Well, there’s not a clear answer for that. I started writing short poems when I was 13, along with taking the first steps on the guitar, so it didn’t take too long for me to join the two things together.
Writing, in every form, including music, always puts me in a completely suspended state. The world around freezes, and images and ideas start floating around me.
When I started writing songs, I used to put down the lyrics first, which I was usually writing in a ‘motion state’ sitting on a train or a bus, and once back home, the music was finally layered on top of the words.
In the past twenty years, my approach has changed, and I usually sit with my guitar trying to combine interesting chord progressions with a melody made from words I feel are right for that developing music. I don’t normally plan the topic of the song I’m composing, and when I wrote “A Better Place,” I wasn’t fully aware of the direction the lyrics would have taken.
I suppose that being an immigrant moving to the UK in 2015, and witnessing the ‘questionable’ Brexit event, built some concern in my subconscious that eventually led to the writing of this song a few years later.
As history teaches us, humankind needs leaders, and leaders of powerful countries have delicate responsibilities to deal with. I suppose we must accept the fact that we are like pawns moving passively on the complex world’s chessboard, piloted by mechanisms too intricate for most of us to grasp. However, we shouldn’t ignore the way things are done and decisions taken.
Since I was a child, I’ve never perceived physical or cultural differences as a limitation or as means to claim the right to sit on the throne of supremacy. Any diversity was just too fascinating for me – languages, traditions, colours, and religions – I wanted to know them all, and therefore I kept traveling everywhere as soon as I had the chance.
I’m not saying I didn’t have to deal with frictions and divergent opinions throughout my entire life, but I have learned that they don’t necessarily depend on ‘geography.’ Fear is the biggest deterrent that prevents us from embracing diversity and build walls around us. Fear of not knowing enough, of being weak, of being ‘invaded’, and losing our space, our control, our own safe identity.
Politicians know it too well, and they know how to play the game better than we do, especially in the nowadays mentally anesthetized digital world. News and digital contents in the past twenty years brainwashed humanity and worked hard to separate people, so no more deep and collective communication, equal, no more revolutions. We are afraid of our neighbours, not interested in other people's opinions, selfish, irritable, and lonelier.
It's not about conspiracy theories here, it’s about looking around, noticing how isolation is progressively taking over our societies, and how ‘fragmented’ they are becoming.
“A Better Place” is about all that. All these thoughts sitting in the back of my mind went down from my pencil onto the paper, and then on the strings of my guitar.
I think that every form of art happens for a reason, often without any logical preconcept, but carrying a message that someone, someday, will make its own. So, there is nothing premeditate in this song, simply the thoughts and emotions of an ordinary man living in a new technological era still trying to understand where the wind is blowing.
I truly hope you will enjoy watching the video and listening to this song, and somehow some note we’ll meet you along the path.
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