There’s a precise moment when a song stops being a song and becomes something else. He catches you while you’re washing the dishes, or catches you in the car and forces you to roll down the window as if you suddenly need fresh air. “Qui con me”, brought by Serena Brancale to the Sanremo Festival, is exactly that type of song. He speaks softly, with that disarming calm of someone who knows very well what is happening inside you.
It works for those who have lost their mothers and have learned, over time, that that type of emptiness changes shape, moves, and can be found in unexpected places. Too quiet on a Sunday morning. In the number in your address book that you don’t delete, because deleting it seems as definitive as the loss ever was.
When music finds the words we don’t have
Talking about mourning for your mother is one of those things that is done halfway. We mention it, we go around it, we use the verb “to lose” as if the person was lost somewhere and was still waiting to be found. In Italy the bond with the mother has an almost anthropological dimension. The mother is the confidant, the arbiter of important decisions, the voice you hear in your head when you are about to do something stupid. When that voice is silent, the silence it leaves has a different quality from all other silences. Brancale herself explains it very well:
For six years I held within me an emotion that I didn’t feel I could share, the grief that overwhelmed me when my mother passed away. Then something happened. During my last tour, I felt the need to tell this part of me
“Here with me” lives exactly in that place. Serena Brancale builds images that leave space for the listener, she walks alongside everyone’s personal story without putting herself in front. Those who have already gone through a major loss immediately recognize when an artist speaks from an authentic place. And here the authenticity is felt, almost uncomfortable. The text works on the physical need to feel someone close, now, here. For those who have lost their mothers it becomes the continuation of a dialogue that takes place entirely in the head, without a response from the other side, yet still alive.
Brancale’s song explained to those who listened to it with a weight in their chest
Music arrives where ordinary language gets stuck. When you’re in the midst of grief, the words of others often ring false, even those said with the best intentions. A song, on the other hand, keeps you company without expecting anything in return, without explaining how you should be.
“Qui con me” belongs to that rare category of songs that become a space to return to. Those who experience the absence of a loved one look for traces, ways to prolong the internal dialogue. A melody can become a bridge to those memories, without invading. Three minutes in which you feel less alone, then life resumes as usual, but with something slightly different inside.
That Brancale chose to bring such a personal song to Sanremo, in a context that often rewards scenic effect, says something. Remaining exposed, imperfect, emotionally present was a precise choice. And the public that carries a loss in its pocket like a stone in its shoe, the one that still hurts intermittently, recognized it immediately.
The lyrics of the song
There’s a song playing on the radio
And that speaks about us.
Of that love that will always remain, will never pass.
And when I think of you I feel that shiver coming through my heart,
In this silence I hear your voice,
Calm, anger, thirst, hunger and will not change
That complicity that I looked for in your eyes as a child and that will always remain with me
He will accompany.
What if I took you away from those stars
To erase your goodbye from my skin
I would climb the earth and the sky
Even the entire universe
To still have you here with me.
And I talk to you as if you were next to me
Two drops of water are never lost in the sea,
And then look at me, how much I look like you
In the hands, in the love that
You put yourself into things every time
And every day was always worth celebrating
I’m like that too
We are so similar
We are so similar
What if I took you away from those stars
To erase your goodbye from my skin
I would climb the earth and the sky
Even the entire universe
To still have you here with me
What if I took you away from those stars
I would hold you tight too now and forever
I would climb the earth and the sky
Even the entire universe
To still have you here with me
How much life time steals
Beyond the limits I feel you
I know you are still here with me.
With me, with me.
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