Gazzelle: “Hamburgers and remorse, life is made of this”

Flavio Pardini is Gazzelle. Gazzelle is Flavio Pardini. Two realities, one way of expressing oneself, music. On the one hand, the thirty-year-old boy who faces a difficult historical period for everyone looking at all his demons in the face, clashing with himself and with doubts and fears, who speaks with a smile, without being afraid to show a sweet fragility that perhaps is what makes him so empathetic in writing, on the other hand the singer-songwriter with sold out palaces and the incredible success that changed his life and made him one of the reference voices of indie songwriting made of love songs. The outlet of both faces is in the writing of songs that always talk about him, talking to everyone.

Ok shit (Maciste Dischi / Artist First) is the repack of his third album OK released in February 2021, inside there are four more songs because it was time to release them, as always happens when he needs to say something. From All things, the summer success with Mara Sattei to the last single Fuckin ‘song from the title the message is clear, there is nothing “Ok” in this moment. Yet there is a great desire to regain the freedom to sing in the face of all his audience, returning to fill those places that have been closed for too long, with a tour that has been moved and now announced in the arenas since May.

Ok shit?
«The idea was to draw conclusions with this repack. It came naturally to me to call it that. Already OK it was a sarcastic title, now, after almost a year, this is what it is. Both for the world and for my private life, for the things that have happened to me. At one point I even thought of calling him KO ».

What KO’d her?
“Myself. It’s always me in the ring against myself. And I lost. The other has won ».

Blame the pandemic?
“It’s the fault of the sum of many small or perhaps not always small things, which have marked these last two years. For me they have been troubled, as for everyone. In my specific case, I entered a sort of existential crisis. I ended a relationship. So many things together that are weighed on a psychological level … and I was not used to them. Before 2020, like everyone else, I had ups and downs, but never clearly psychological problems. I have experienced complex and unprecedented moments for me and initially difficult to manage. Now I’m starting to understand how to do it ».

It had to stop suddenly, after years of great success and touring. Is this also to blame?
“Stopping me totally affected. Until 2020 I was living in the running. My life in three years had changed completely and I had never stopped even to reflect on everything that had happened to me. That overbearing stop that held us down by force made me somehow go back to who I was before my life changed. As if I had paused my life at 26, to immerse myself in this thing called music, where I started going at a hundred per hour. I felt thrown back to square one. Flavio again, without distractions. I found myself thinking too much. It is not healthy to have that much time to do this. Trying to draw the positive out of it, however, I got to understand everything that those three years had changed, all that fuss. Only that negative things weighed more, so much boredom, so many bad thoughts, so many things to mull over, so much remorse ».

Remorse?
«Burgers and remorse. Life is made up of this, isn’t it? “

Did you see anything positive?
«If I think about my career and music, I feel that I have been very good, the problem is Flavio. At the turn of my thirties, perhaps I am simply in the cliché of the thirty year old breaking away from adolescence and becoming a man. And that upsets me. This added to a love story gone very badly and a pandemic… let’s say I’m lucky if I’m still here smiling ».

Does it scare you to grow up?
“Growing up scares me. It is not what I leave behind that scares me, but the unknown ahead. Right now I’m in the middle and I think it’s normal to be like this, we grow up, we go inexorably forward. But I have to deal with it. The theory is one thing, the practice quite another. ”

In the new repack there are four new songs, I guess there are many more in the drawer. Why not a new album?
«It’s partly because I always do the repack, it doesn’t mean that it will always be like this, but OK it came out in a dark time for humanity and in September I needed to write new songs because I had more to say, but I didn’t want to make a new record right away. I don’t have a drawer, I have a black hole in which there are many, I’m writing a lot. But I want to take things calmly. I am not in a hurry, my ambition is to make an next important record dedicating the time it deserves to it. The time I deserve. I’m not going to make a record and not be able to play it in front of people, I can’t afford it anymore ».