interview
Give Vent
Days Like Years is the first lp of Marcello Donadelli aka Give Vent: a compelling folk, contemporary and alive, divided in eight tracks.
Can you tell your story to date and explain
why you chose a name like “Give Vent”?
Give Vent was born in 2012 during a forced
break from the “You Vs Everything” (my
previous midwest-emocore project) due to a
change of formation. At that time I had some
pieces that were not suited to the sounds of
“You”, were much more personal and intimate, and they needed a different dimension. I’ve
always written with acoustic guitar, then it
came a little by itself thinking to take them in
solitary in a folk context. Very slowly I started
doing some small live in my area, and by the
time I molded more and more of “Give Vent”
mood. At the end of 2014 almost all of the
songs were changed and I realized that I was
ready to collect them on an lp. Earlier that
30
year (2015) I wrote to Ivan Tonelli of Stop
Studio I had met a few months earlier and
with Andrea Muccoli in the heat of July we
made this record. The choice of “Give Vent” is
the approach of live and intimacy of the pieces. When I started to arrange, I realized that
I tended to be a bit extreme and to exteriorize
a lot with voice and guitar. I liked it. The exorcising. The blow off steam. Everything was
going in that direction and to give a name to
this project, I wanted something that sounded like a “name” as “Frank Turner” or “Ben
Marwood”, for understanding, and eventually
“Give Vent” contained a bit of all this.
Alongside classic songs “by songwriter” I
found some curious and angrier songs: for
example, can you tell us how it was born
“More than a Self Destruction”?
“Self ” is placed between the first and the second production of Give Vent, the one that
got to the record. Its first version was slow,
with arpeggio and rather melancholic, very
different than today’s version. The song
perhaps had its punk character also in the
first version, it was probably just “dress” to be
unsuitable. “Self ” is about to remain stranded
in those habits, ways and thoughts that come
from being with one person, and that sometimes, it is precisely the kind of things that
eventually lead to the collapse of a relationship. Those are the gestures that do not belong to you at all, and that after the break you
promise to eliminate, although sometimes
you realize that is not so simple. “Self ” is the
reminder to stop the self-destruction.
Another of the songs that have intrigued me
is “Ashes”: what is its genesis?
The “Ashes” lyrics arrived after yet another
project where I had spent a lot of time. When
it was finished, regardless of the commitment
or the will, it left me a sense of emptiness given by the knowledge that it was all over. It’s
a bit as the realization of the next day. Generally it tells much about Give Vent, how
some songs are born, why and my own way of
dealing with certain situations and exorcise.
“Ashes” temporally was written after “Self ”
(first version) and it is probably the moment
I found the strongest dimension of the idea of
how Give Vent sounds.