L'operaio Gerolamo

In Il giorno aveva cinque teste, Lucio Dalla made a significant turn in his career, marking the beginning of a creative partnership with the poet Roberto Roversi. This album, along with later productions such as Anidride solforosa and Automobili, is considered a turning point both for his career and for Italian-language songwriting. In 1973, Dalla decided to change direction in his lyrical writing, leaving behind Sergio Bardotti and Gianfranco Baldazzi, who had been his usual collaborators. Instead, he turned to the poet from Bologna, Roberto Roversi, for a collaboration that would span four years and include three albums.

Lucio Dalla, born in Bologna on March 4, 1943, and died in Montreux on March 1, 2012, was a singer-songwriter and actor with a nearly 50-year career. With a jazz musical background, he later emerged as the author of his own lyrics. He played the clarinet and saxophone, and sometimes keyboards. His music spanned various stages, from beat to rhythmic and melodic experimentation, blending singer-songwriter traditions with Italian lyrical and melodic elements. He began as a clarinetist in a jazz group in Rome, where he shared space with Fabrizio Zampa and Massimo Catalano, supported by Carlo Loffredo. In his performances, he often improvised vocalizations in the scat style, a technique also practiced by Adriano Celentano in the 1960s and 1970s. Dalla also studied the vocal style of James Brown, exploring a deliberately dissonant and rough use of voice, with a jazzistic tendency to embellish melodic lines with unexpected variations. It was Gino Paoli who encouraged him to try his luck as a solo artist.