Niccolò Agliardi: “When I stopped depending on others”

For those who are reading this interview hoping to find something about the American adventure of Niccolò Agliardi, we can only tell you that the Golden Globe who won for I do (Seen) it is kept in Niccolò’s Milanese apartment, above the amplifier and next to a small whale enclosed inside a glass dome made by a friend of hers. For all the others, those who – like him – are eager to move on and discover new details about the life of an artist who has been making music for twenty years – 4 unreleased records, 3 books, 3 collections of songs, 2 television programs , a collaboration with a newspaper and 3 songs written for the cinema – it’s time to start from a simple word: Hostages, which is the title of both the new song by Agliardi of which Vanity Fair anticipates the video preview, and of the film by Eleonora Ivone, available on Sky and streaming on NOW with Vanessa Incontrada, Gianmarco Tognazzi, Francesco Pannofino and Alessandro Haber which inspired it.

Agliardi is serene. He organized a 47th birthday party with his son Sam and a small group of friends, and looks to the future with placid optimism, allowing himself only a small addiction: a cigarette he has smoked a day for about fifteen years.

In the song at a certain point he sings: “Everyone keeps his pain in his pocket.” What’s in your pocket today?
“No more pain. After the age of 40 you find that you can be interesting even without the pain. Today I relativize a lot, I don’t know where it is, I put everything I thought I lived between 20 and 30 years: perhaps it was simply functional to the movement. Today I know that pain exists, but I don’t contemplate it ».

Why?
«Because it is uncomfortable, boring, cumbersome. It takes away so much from other things ».

Yet it is often said that pain is decisive for moving certain things on a creative level.
“That’s true, I can only be thankful for the pain: there hasn’t been pain in my life that hasn’t led to something interesting from a creative point of view, but today I don’t care anymore. If I can be in motion even without pain it is already a good result. Once a literature teacher of mine told me that great masterpieces are always written ten centimeters from pain, never in between. Here, I believe that it can be done even ten centimeters from happiness. The important thing is to have a measure ».

So in your pocket today you feel you have happiness?
«It will be that I live an age that stabilizes. I have a great sense of serenity right now: I like walking and, above all, taking care of plants. The earth gives me a sense of great concreteness, it is from the earth that beautiful things are born. To keep up with it, however, great discipline and relativism are needed ».

Discipline, however, as it sings in Hostages, it can often lead to “failure without dignity”.
“As long as I enjoyed being a singer, I never felt like a failure. Failure is a necessary consideration when the effort you put into accomplishing a thing outweighs the gratification that thing can give you. I could say anything about myself, except that I am a failure. In Hostages there is a different awareness, because you can finally decide what to depend on ».

What do you depend on today?
«From my passions, from my amusements, from my merits. In the song I talk about how much we have been hostages not of what we have chosen, but of what the adversities of life or lack of awareness put us on the road. I liked the idea of ​​working on the film because all of us, at some point in our lives, have been hostages to someone: it is when you realize that you break the chains of imprisonment ».

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Before, however, what was he addicted to?
“From the people, from the judgment they had about me, from the mistaken belief that I depended on someone else’s will: the phone call that didn’t come, the person who didn’t help me with the record, the one who didn’t believe in me. Instead, in a climate of normal friction between life and ambition, when you don’t depend on others and you become independent or develop a talent, it’s cool that you choose the collaboration with others. You are the one who moves things ».

Was there a specific moment when you managed to figure it out?
“I had a great epiphany during a therapy session. When I asked myself why I would have to wait for others to decide for me it was enlightening: being polite doesn’t mean being submissive. If you value yourself and remember the centrality of your work, the fact of being polite, a hair behind, does not disfigure being at all, which must still remain central. That day I took on a new awareness: we can be cells that meet other cells, but we are also living cells, without waiting for someone to tell us ».

A cell that, this year, celebrates twenty years of career.
«Twenty years of travel, all very exciting, very few celebrations».

Don’t you like celebrations?
«They are not needed. The dust in the house settles the same, I lived in the house like everyone else, feeding my baby, seeing the usual friends with whom I have a lot of fun. Nothing has changed ».

Meanwhile, on May 27 he celebrated his birthday with two slightly different numbers on the cake: 23.
«I had had candles in the house for who knows how long: they were used for a wish. It was one of the most peaceful birthdays of my life, close to the people I love ».

You talked a lot about serenity in this interview: what is it for you?
“Lower your thinking. There was a time when I woke up every morning with the nightmare of making sense of things, what I was doing, at work. One morning, on vacation in the Caribbean, I had savory alternatives in front of the breakfast buffet that I never eat. I remember smelling bacon and thinking that meaning was a much more earthly, primitive and archaic thing than I thought. I said to myself: who the fuck cares about meaning? All existence, after all, is great nonsense. The sense of existence is given by small emotions, it seems banal but that’s how it is “