Jack Savoretti

During a career closing in on 20 years and spanning 7 albums, millions of sales around the world, tour after tour, collaborations with some of the most legendary artists the likes of Bob Dylan, Kylie Minogue, Nile Rodgers and Paolo Conte to name a few, Jack Savoretti has become accustomed to travelling. Through his journey he has developed his own sound and identity but having recently celebrated his 40th birthday, he decided to take this one step further and embark on his first album written in Italian.

"When my father recently passed," recounts Savoretti, "I was in a period of constant writing, with words flowing from mind to page but without passing through my heart. I realised that my words were lacking emotion. I decided to stop, detach from the music, and give myself the opportunity to live and experience the pain and emotions that I may have been holding back. It became apparent that my father's absence had, among other things, a deeply personal significance: my father was the anchor that tied me to Italy, the connection to my roots that I felt I was at risk of losing without him."

How can a singer-songwriter, someone who has used music and words for most of his life to express himself and his surroundings, reconnect with those emotions and his ties to his roots, his past, and his childhood?

The answer, of course, lies in music — just not Jack's music this time, but the music of other Italian authors and songwriters who helped rekindle the poetry he felt slipping away. Jack decided not to escape from the storm and the pain, but to endure and try to heal from the vulnerability he felt growing stronger each day.

"I went back to school, and began learning to understand the pain I was feeling. I didn't want to run from it but to live through it, and Italian music was the teacher that helped me decode my emotions so they could once again run through me and onto the blank page in front of me."

There's a word that Savoretti often uses to describe this process: CRAFT.

As he progressed, Jack set out to find writers and producers who could collaborate and guide him in doing something he had never tried before. "I didn't want to imitate Italian music, I wanted to make it my own, combining everything I had learned over almost 20 years of experience in America, England, and Italy, merging Anglo-Saxon singer-songwriting with Italian to create something unique. I first had to learn to write in Italian before making MY album in Italian."

The result is "MISS ITALIA," an album that sounds every bit Jack Savoretti whilst also being a first. The title, a play on words, notes a longing for Italy ("the nostalgia for my childhood memories, which perhaps no longer exist because the anchor that kept me tied to the past is gone") and that possibly romantic idea "of wanting to portray the Italy I know and discover what I do not yet know in order to narrate it to others."

With a rough, passionate, and poignant voice, Jack Savoretti sets aside all judgment, making the necessary room for a journey to rediscover his roots — a journey fuelled by the curiosity of a young man who feels Italian when abroad but English when in Italy.