Pretend Pretend Pretend

This song sounds like a hall of mirrors where the rhythm stretches like chewing gum, yet never loses its elegance. The track Pretend Pretend Pretend is built on a meter that oscillates between jazz and swing, with an air of milonga that never stays still. Conte doesn’t aim to imitate anything; instead, he blends these worlds as if they were colors on a canvas: the piano sounds like a Parisian bar at dawn, but the strings carry that South American hint that had already peeked through in his earlier work. What’s most curious is how the track sways between playfulness and melancholy without ever betraying the effort. Conte’s voice, with that nasal timbre that’s now his signature, floats above the arrangements as if hovering over the Seine.

He recorded it at the Format studio in Turin, the same place where he had cut his first albums with Lilli Greco as producer. Happy Ruggiero, the studio’s owner and a musician on the track, played the eminent—a string instrument that sounds like a violin but with a brighter, more metallic sheen. The other songs on the album Paris milonga were recorded at the RCA studios in Rome, but Pretend Pretend Pretend remained tied to that Turin space, where Conte and Greco rekindled a partnership that had borne fruit years earlier. The album, released in May 1981, marked the end of one chapter and the start of another: jazz and swing were no longer a nod but the DNA of his music.