Biondo: “Don’t call me Garçon anymore”

To Simone Baldasseroni, better known as Blond, the changes have always stimulated: “It’s since I was 14 that change has brought me incredible adrenaline” he tells on the phone just back from Egypt and in evident excitement about the release of Boy, the single that marks his return to music two years on Ego, his second studio album. “A new era is beginning: I changed manager and team, and I finally freed myself from various bureaucratic issues that prevented me from getting my things out earlier “insists Biondo explaining that Boy, which he created together with Shade’s complicity, will anticipate the release of an album whose title is still top secret but will contain 12 songs, the “best” written in the last two years.

«I say ‘don’t call me garçon’ because I wanted to communicate a break with the past: 2 years ago on social media I was called garçon, but that’s enough, it’s a new beginning “continues Biondo, the artist we all met thanks to seventeenth edition of Friends and that, for some years now, we have had the opportunity to appreciate as an actor in films like It’s for your own good, available on Prime Video, and in fiction as God help us. In the fall we will see him in a new TV movie with Sergio Castellitto dedicated to mental illness (“I play a Milanese boy, here I really play”) but, in the meantime, we start from his great return in the sign of a toxic relationship that involved the same artist involved in the past.

What do you mean Boy It is based on a true story?
“In the sense that I have really experienced these things. It’s a very personal song, not the classic summer catchphrase: it’s about a girl I trusted who, at one point, sold me to a magazine. One thing that still hurts ».

Did he really “smash a suite” as he sings in the song?
“These are things that a toxic love like the one we had with her leads you to do: they threw things at us, we broke dishes. Many such things have happened ».

Now what remains of that period?
«I am much calmer and more focused on my work. Before I needed to have a girlfriend because I wanted her to keep me grounded, but today I accepted that I could do things by myself: I’m working on this. Before, I was very morbid and most of the songs on the new record talk about this aspect of me ».

Do you think you have reached the right detachment to talk about it?
«When you live things it is difficult to externalize yourself. The refrain of Boy I wrote it 2 years ago, while the verses 2 weeks ago: first it was a concoction of random thoughts, and I have to give credit to Shade who inspired me to rewrite my bars in a more introspective, orderly way. A change was needed ».

What is change for you?
“Something I look for and I need. At 13 I was a cook, I had a blog, I was quite launched but, when I published a song, Four walls, dedicated to my ex girlfriend and it went viral, I realized I wanted to change. My parents did not want at first, but the adrenaline was so great that I insisted on the music until Friends. Then came the cinema, which also came here by chance: when I presented myself to the audition, everything came by itself. I like change, it stimulates me ».

When it stops what happens?
“I hate Sundays for that reason. I always like doing things: if I don’t do something to improve myself I think I haven’t done well ».

And this year and a half in which we have all been forced to stop, how was it?
«Paradoxically well, because I have found myself again. After the talent, which I did 5 years ago, I went to live in Milan and I slipped into a tunnel from which I came out choosing to return to Rome, getting closer to spirituality and music. I wanted to do something for myself, take some time to understand where I was going ».

What do you mean by spirituality?
“I have always been a believer in my own way but, in recent years, I had lost my way. I asked for so many things in my life and when they arrived I felt like I didn’t deserve them, so I walked away. I had lost the link with spirituality, but luckily now I have found it again ».

Do you believe in destiny?
“I believe in willpower and luck: you have to be the right man at the right time. In my case, however, there is also a lot of work behind it: before Friends I had been making music for 6 years. At the first audition I knew I was inside because I felt that, somehow, it was the right time. There and then I didn’t feel ready, but once I turned on the camera I knew that this was my place. Today I would be more ready to do a talent as I write more mature songs like, in fact, Boy».

What do you hope for the future?
«I don’t want to shoot crosses on the future: now I’m fine, and when a person is well everything is more lucid. I can’t wait to release my new music because the fans deserve it, there is no day in which they don’t write to me and this is very nice, certainly not taken for granted ».