The singer-songwriters, who for years settled mainly between Italy and France, with a spurious and wild derivation in North and South America, are a species of human beings almost extinct.
Creatures half musician and half poet, they sang about their lives, their worldview and what they felt in their hearts and assimilated in their minds: love adventures, childhood traumas, epochal dramas, political ideals, devoured readings and films drunk as wine, more red than white.
Their compositions gave off something wonderful that made you grow healthier, freer and, in my opinion, happier, even if at times it pissed you off that life was not as many of them dreamed it was.
But they accompanied you along a path that undoubtedly existed, between the charm of the road to travel and the immense uncertainty of the sky. And they did so using sounds, instruments, melodies and arrangements that drew on the tradition of all the music of the world, often mixing spirits and essences, like alchemists and creating special liaisons with other instrumentalists.
Unfortunately today those creatures are very few, especially in Italy.
They often live hidden and are content, like Marsican bears, with their diversity.
I am lucky enough to know one of these specimens.
Stefano Barotti was born and lives in Massa, he wets his feet and counts the waves in Forte dei Marmi and if he once went to America it was only the music's fault.
At the age of 45 he released his fourth record in 17 years and it is a precious, complete, exciting work. With "Pensieri Verticali", in 2015 he had reached artistic maturity and written some gems that have been quietly ignored by the musical extabilishment and what is even sadder even by the specialized critics.
Don't blame yourself if you don't know him yet, it's not just a lack of you.
Now he's back to colouring the soul with an even more complex and varied album, which places him more and more as an all-round musician, strong of a personal style given by his way of narrating and expressing feelings that flies over half a century of evolution of the song in a way that is never trivial.
"Il grande temporale", a title that has never been more appropriate for the times we are living, is a musical journey that embraces the progressive of the Seventies.
It does so without mannerism both in the "title track" with which the album opens with Fabrizio Sisti's synths, creating an atmosphere reinforced by the harmony of the rhythmic section of Vladimiro Carboni (drums) and Luca Silvestri (bass) who have been following the author live for years, and in at least three other episodes: in the space-time vortex that envelops "Aleppo", where poetry links childhood memories and inevitable wars, both those created by man and those generated by his psyche, and in "Il cielo e il prato" in which James Haggerty's fantastic bass guitar excels and in "Marta", a more ruthless and cold "Marinella" (like the current era) about feminicide.
But they are not poses, Stefano is one of those real characters who do not need to dress up in curses and pose as a misunderstood artist, nor do they need to find topics of conversation. For some time now he has made a reason that music doesn't pay and he continues to paint houses for a living.
Oh, no that's not really a singer-songwriter!
In fact he chooses a reggae to tell it, in the autobiographical and ironic "Painter Loser", which makes the verse to the Marley of "Is this love". Just as there are lively references to diagonal genes of the songwriter's song as Ivan Graziani and the Jannacci evoked in "Enzo", fantastic and surreal peana.  
Getting lost in Barotti's stories is a conscious abandonment punctuated by musicians with bows (the band of American friends, from Jono Manson to Joe Pisapia and the very refined Italians Paolo Ercoli (dobro and mandolin) and Vittorio Alinari to the winds).
Gift, as Lucio Dalla would have said, of a not bad production.
With so much class and purity it is not difficult that a piece like "Spatola e spugna" (Spatula and sponge), in addition to sending the working class to heaven and to sip with wisdom distilled in Tennessee nostalgia, becomes a neorealist short film from when football was a popular novel.
Fragments of when "everything was magic", but also the absolute beauty of a very high love song ("Last night I had a dream" with a crescendo of strings that is at one with an ability to rummage through the heart that is really few) and other noble sentiments that are not ashamed to reveal themselves in front of the cynicism disguised as normality of these times ("When I will tell" and "Everything new", with references to the more romantic and sunny Pino Daniele).
On the other hand, what do you want to expect from someone to whom even Tom Waits has phoned?
There's really little else to say, keep your ears open to hear something he really deserves and if you can do it, close your mouth and your mobile phone for a while.
Don't land, you don't have to force yourself to be careful, there's not too much to understand.
It is enough to be carried away by the music like a colourful umbrella on a moonlit night, while drops of a great thunderstorm fall all around.