“Maddalena is the natural evolution of the path that began in 2017 with Down the River, and even before that with the theater: that urgency, almost a mania, to enter the cracks of the human soul to see how much light can pass through, to paraphrase Leonard Cohen. Narrating those who have made it is easy, much more difficult is trying to give voice to those who have been knocked down, to those who have tried, fought and failed.
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Naples, as a city and community, is riding this wave of perfection at all costs, leaving aside and hiding everything that does not correspond to this vision. As a singer-songwriter, and as a rock singer-songwriter above all, I feel that the ruptures, the wounds, the shortcomings and failures, human, social, institutional, must instead be shown, to return to looking at reality, and the faces that surround us, with honesty and sincerity. Without filters, neither digital nor real”.
Rock narration, that of a contemporary storyteller, electric and poetic, angry and emotional. We are talking about Valerio Bruner, who two years after the appreciated Vicarìa returns with Maddalena (Ulisse Records), the fifth album of an artistic journey that began ten years ago. In this decade the Neapolitan singer-songwriter has highlighted all his musical and artistic way and has expressed himself in the round between rock, theater and writing. At the center of his work once again Naples: as in the previous album a Naples far from the postcard and mass tourism, that of the alleys where the sun does not enter, a carnage of saints and concrete, of vases and counterfeit goods, of crumbling houses and street madonnas, of speeding scooters and forgotten siren songs. Here lives Maddalena, like the woman who loved Christ in the Gospels, like the black market neighborhood behind Piazza Garibaldi, like the streets that Valerio walked with his father on Sunday mornings to reach the fish market at Porta Nolana.
Recorded in October 2024 at Deck Lab Studio in Rimini with production and arrangements by Gianluca Morelli (Landlord), Maddalena is a resilient, passionate, hopeful album. Eight vernacular rock songs still imbued with the poetics and attitude of Bruce Springsteen – a great influence for Valerio Bruner – but with a different, more mature breath, also thanks to the work in Rimini: “The Naples I speak of is rock, punk, grunge, it has little to do with a certain type of sound that looks to the Mediterranean and World Music. Ancient and wonderful harmonies and melodies, but which do not reflect, in my vision, the neighborhoods, the faces, the lives of the “Naples of the border” where I was born and raised and that I tell. With Maddalena I felt the need to go beyond and look beyond. Combining Neapolitan blood with the soul of Romagna was a fusion that interested and stimulated me and from which I knew something unique, new, or at least different from what you would expect from an album in Neapolitan could be born”.
Valerio Bruner
Singer-songwriter, writer and playwright who uses his songs as a tool to give voice to issues with a strong social value. He began his artistic career as a playwright and actor, in 2017 he debuted with his EP Down the River, followed by La Belle Dame (2019) and La Belle Dame #2 (2020), the EP Someday (2021), Vicarìa (2023). Also concerts, books, plays, soundtracks, collaborations and interventions in civil society in favor of important causes, between marginalization, social redemption and culture. The common thread that links Valerio's rich activity and that also characterizes Maddalena's rock d'autore is the revolutionary spirit: “As a boy I believed that songs had the power to change things, at least to shape them in a different direction. Now, at almost 40, I believe it even more. I have proof of it every time I play in front of an audience and I feel that the furrow I am carving through my songs can really be the first step of a generous harvest, one day. How do I know? Because I know that songs create empathy in the heart of the other”.
Songs of anger and redemption, of daily life and hope. All linked to a muse. The one that journalist Carmine Aymone writes about in the preface of the Travel Diary included in the special format of the CD Maddalena: “The inspiring muse for Valerio Bruner is Naples, with its anarchic, wild, dissonant, ethical and heretical, seductive, intoxicating… unique beauty”.
Article published on May 7, 2025 - 14:20 pm
Video Chronicles
The article describes Valerio Bruner's music well, but I don't know if it's right to say that Naples is only beautiful. There are also ugly aspects that are not shown, and perhaps it would be better to have a balance between the two. Music must reflect life.