Toronto-based singer/songwriter Andrea Ramolo could not sit idly by as she watched the horrific news reports of the toll the Covid-19 pandemic was taking on her ancestral home of Italy. So, like any artist, she was motivated by sadness, anguish, and a firm resolve to offer her love and support in the best way she knows how – to write, record and release a powerful, emotional, tug-at-your hear, and ultimately spiritually uplifting new song.
Una Lettera is that song, and as the title infers it is very much a love letter to Ramolo’s Italian family members, friends and indeed the entire nation of Italy. And as the title also indicates, it is sung in Italian, a first for the first generation Canadian, whose parents emigrated to Canada from a small Italian village called Limosano, in the Molise region in the southern part of the nation many years ago. The song is available for $1, but those wishing to pay more to donate more to the cause can do so at the Bandcamp link at the end of this article. All proceeds are going to help pandemic relief efforts in Italy, one of the hardest hit countries of the Covid-19 virus.
The heartbreak of watching what was unfolding in Italy in real time on the TV news, and hearing from friends and relatives throughout Italy prompted the creation of the song.
“I was just crying multiple times each day. I was speaking to family and friends and their stories were so sad and scary. One of my dearest friends, who I went to high school with, she is Canadian, but she moved over there more than a decade ago and married and Italian man. She was about to give birth to her first baby, that she tired so long and hard to have. She was about to go to the hospital and be induced and she was in southern Italy and this pandemic was spreading so fast and she was just terrified just picturing what it must be like. And I was just picturing what I might be like for people too, including my cousin who lives up in Lombardia, in the north, which was the initial epicentre, and I just found myself starting to write what became Una Lettera,” Ramolo explained.
“On the night that I went into record the vocals, the very night that I actually decided to go into my back room [where she had set up a makeshift studio during her self-isolation] and sing the song in Italian, one of my very close friends, who has always treated me like a little sister, and lives in Rome, told me her mother died from the virus. I just couldn’t even bear the feeling and the thought of her being alone, quarantined in her apartment without having said goodbye to her own mother, and not even being able to have a hug or a condolence visit from a friend. Imagine losing your parent and being trapped inside your own house, and also knowing that your parent’s last hours were spent alone. That’s a nightmare.
“For me, she definitely became the heart and soul of this song. I actually just texted her to check in on her and make sure that she is okay. I am going to send her the song. And the reaction and support I am getting for the song proves what I always say about community and coming together. I feel that these times are really challenging us to step it up, to really support one another like we never have before. The thing is this is for a greater purpose and people are coming together. I am so touched and so moved by people’s generosity that I am seeing, and I hope that those who are still kind of isolated will be inspired by those who are sharing their hearts and souls with the world right now.”
The impulse to write a song that was a love offering, an offering of support and the way to express her grief and frustration at not being able to help those she cared about over in Italy spurred one her Ramolo’s most adventurous, heartfelt and particularly beautiful composition. Una Lettera is a compelling song in any language, but the fact that it is Ramolo’s first ever song to be written and sung in her second language, gives it even more emotional and spiritual gravitas.
“Italian is not my first language, and of course I was terrified and scared, and there was this lack of confidence there because it isn’t my mother tongue. I had tried before, but kind of chickened out, but for some reason I didn’t care this time, and I just broke down all those walls I had put up and I made this song for my loved ones and for my friends and family in Italy, and for everyone else too – for the world. If you read the translation of the lyrics, its about how we need to use our love of the planet, our love for each other to put this thing [Covid-19] to an end,” she said.
“I wanted to make something honest and I wanted to make something beautiful for my family and friends overseas. I really have been quite sad about what’s been going on over there, and especially over the first few weeks where you just saw this poor little country shut right down. It’s such a tiny piece of land. Even though there are 63 million people in Italy, it’s one third the size of Ontario in terms of its geography.
“I heard from my cousins from the north and from the south and they are terrified and for the early stages, they didn’t know what was going on. And they can’t leave. It’s not like here in Ontario where you see people walking their dogs and going for bike rides and stuff. They are locked in their homes and are on complete lockdown.”
“It will get better, it will pass.
Sunset… sunrise.
Love can save us.
We will remember every summer
Where the sun hit the sand.
Love can, love can, love can save us.”
– Una Lettera (English translation), by Andrea Ramolo
Ramolo is a little reticent to admit that she seems to be the most creative and the more artistically productive during times of crisis and hard times, be they in her own life, or on a more global scale. She sees it as both a blessing and a curse – her fans would argue it is most definitely a blessing in their lives, as she is able to apply her humanity, compassion, and sadness to experiences that many people have gone through to make music. This is truly a gift, but it means that these bursts of creative output are accompanied by the pain of the situations that inspire them. Una Lettera is just one example of this.
“I find myself lucky, in a strange way. And it’s kind of dark to say this, but I feel I am one of those people that really excels during hard times. For example, I first picked up a guitar when I was 23 years old because my mother had stage three breast cancer and I thought she was on her way out and that we were going to lose her. Music and learning that guitar was my form of therapy, and it led to my first album. It’s how I got into recording music and writing my own songs in the first pace,” she said.
“And then of course the Nuda album [released in 2018] came out of a very emotional transition for me in my life, via my personal romantic relationship ending as well as the dissipation of the band that I was in at the time. All of these transformations are detrimental and challenging, but for some reason, and I don’t know why, my coping skills in these moments really come into play in a very creative way. I often don’t create when I am happy and when things are going smoothly. And I want things to go smoothly in my life as a human being, so it’s a struggle. I would love to be one of those artists who really has their discipline down and they can get down to songwriting every morning. They take out their journals or whatever and they write, and they work on material every day, reaching out to people, collaborating and all that.
“For me, for some reason, it is in the moments when things are falling apart that I use music to help myself piece things back together and to stay afloat. And also, I feel this sort of service to society where I kind of need to reach out and be there for people and I know that people connect through the arts and through music and that is my way of communicating to a larger body of people through these tough times.”
The creative impulse did not result in just the wonderful Una Lettera, but two other recordings, which Ramolo released on Spotify and Apple Music last week. One is a re-recording of one of her first ever compositions, Thank You For the Ride Revisited, and another is a cover of a famous Italian romance song by the late Luigi Tenco called Mi Sono Innamorata di Te.
The former was recorded as part of a compilation package called In Basements, In Isolation, put together by songwriter/producers David Newberry and Shawn Clark, which can be found on Bandcamp.
“I wrote it when I was just starting out. I hardly knew how to play guitar back then and I had very little control over my voice as a singer and it sort of just came to me a couple of weeks ago that I would like to re-record that song, especially because of the message behind the song. It is a goodbye song. It is a song about the journey of love and saying goodbye. I feel there is so much grace in the song and acceptance and gratitude because, though it’s a goodbye song and is bittersweet and sad, it has this essence of hope to it and a lot of my songs don’t. This is a song that felt fresh and felt youthful and that makes sense because I wrote it 10 or 11 years ago and recorded it on my first album. I know Thank You for the Ride is a favourite song of fans that have supported me since say one, and I wanted to do this ‘Revisited’ version as a gift for them. I always had it in the back of my mind that I wanted a little more of a mature sounding version, something that sounds more like the sound that I have developed at this point in my musical career.”
The story of Luigi Tenco is an exceptionally tragic one. After performing at the internationally renown Italian Song Festival in Sanremo, Italy in January 1967, the troubled artist, who was a crooning icon and heartthrob throughout the 1960s, allegedly killed himself in his hotel room.
“The song is basically saying ‘I was in love with you because I had nothing else to do, because I just needed something to dream about and something to think about at night.’ It is always alluding to and always brushing aside the fact that he really is in love and it’s kind of given away by the tail end of each of the lines. The song has a deep sense of loneliness and scarcity to it. There is a real barren sound to it, and I wanted to recreate that because that’s how I feel right now in the midst of all that’s going on in the world and being stuck here alone in my apartment. Luigi Tenco also happens to be one of my favourite Italian artists of all time. I just thought it was interesting and I had a particular person in mind that I was singing to, so that was fun.”
To purchase Una Lettera, with proceeds going to the Italian Red Cross for Covid-19 pandemic relief efforts, visit https://andrearamolo.bandcamp.com/track/una-lettera.
For more information on Ramolo, visit www.andrearamolo.com
- Jim Barber is a veteran award-winning journalist and author based in Napanee, ON, who has been writing about music and musicians for 30 years. Besides his journalistic endeavours, he now works as a communications and marketing specialist. Contact him at jimbarberwritingservices@gmail.com.
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