A Temporary Lie
An Interview with Georgeanne Kalweit
Georgeanne Kalweit is first of all an eclectic artist. To fully appreciate what she does we need to overcome barriers between stylistic categories. Her new album, “A Temporary Lie”, is due to be released in mid-March. It’s the result of a collaboration with a new band headed by Cesare Malfatti which combines post-punk, ambient and electronic music. Some of her previous work experiences included singing for the Italian rock band Delta V as well as guesting as a vocalist in Cesare Malfatti and Stefano Ghittoni’s project The Dining Rooms. In 2001 British avant-garde nu jazz group The Cinematic Orchestra did a 7-minute-long remake of “Ink”, an extraordinary song originally performed by Kalweit and Malfatti with lyrics written by Georgeanne.
But Georgeanne does not limit herself to music. She tells me she grew up in a family that liked to document everything that happened around them on Super 8. She learnt how to run a projector at an early age. In High School she worked as a character in many of Roger Nygard’s earlier movies who then went on to become a cult-status Hollywood documentary filmmaker. He did one documentary about the Star Trek fanatics who dress like the TV-series characters in their daily life.
Georgeanne lives in Milan and came to Italy in 1986 to study art. She has a degree in painting and printmaking from the University of Minnesota, the equivalent of the Accademia degree. Right before moving to Italy she spent six months working on a movie called “Cinderella” with Erica Beckman, a world-renowned performance art filmmaker whose films are only shown in museums. In October 2021 Erica Beckman asked Georgeanne to play the part of a man in the Performa Festival in Brooklyn, and ideally they would like to bring their show to Paris. She had to study a lot of Buster Keaton, silent film and Marcel Marceau in order to get into character. Her recent trip to New York gave her the opportunity to meet one of her heroes, Laurie Anderson. She also recently met Patti Smith when she was in concert in Siena. Georgeanne tells me she’s always been a huge fan of both Anderson and Smith, and these encounters have been like a dream come true for her.
“A Temporary Lie with Georgeanne Kalweit” is a very sophisticated album that could even get some attention outside Italy, don’t you think, Georgeanne?
We hope we’ll get some attention in Italy and, yes, we are looking to go beyond borders. It’s definitely, I think, an exportable project. It’s very well produced, you can hear the quality in the sound and it’s credible because I’m mother tongue English. We’ve had the best musicians we could ever ask for including Roberto Dell’Era from Afterhours on bass guitar and Fabio Rondanini from Calibro 35 who is also a resident drummer on the TV show Propaganda Live on La7. For Heaven’s sake, Italy imports everything, why can’t we have a project that’s born in Italy that’s mother tongue English, what’s the problem?
The opening track, “Your Go To”, reminds me of “The Earth Is Flat”, the closer of your previous EP “Swiss Bikes”. They both seem to be a meditation on addiction and old habits that are hard to die.
It doesn’t even have to be necessarily drug addiction, could be any addiction. It can be visual, people are addicted to series. It seems everybody is searching for an evasion, and we are full of opportunities to do that. Being back living in the city after spending 9 years in the countryside has given me new lymph, new inspiration. I have more opportunities to observe society and generally my lyrics are social political, always have been. Yes, old habits are hard to break, I guess my way of writing is always kind of that. But the difference in this album with Cesare Malfatti, there’s more love, it’s more intimate, quieter. Glad you noticed that theme running through. “Your Go To” is very much a Minneapolis song, because I thought about places and people I knew when I was living there in my early twenties. The lyrics talk about a cinema in uptown Minneapolis where the punk scene was and so therefore music and clubs. When I was a younger woman and a university student I lived in that cinema, lived at the club, I was always out, every single night. The imagery is of people I knew that were always running from something, and the character in the song just slips into the cinema to get away from problems. For me the cinema always seemed like playing hooky, going to the cinema in the middle of the day, drinking, having a Bloody Mary and then going into the cinema.
“The U Armchair”, your second track, is indirectly dedicated to the late poet Andrea Zanzotto who was from the particular region of northern Italy I come from, Veneto. Did you meet him in person?
I knew him very well. This is a bit of a long story, I’ll try to make it brief. I was 21 and I was getting ready to go to Florence to study when I met Andrea Zanzotto’s son who was studying at the University of Minnesota. I was already slated to go to Florence. Everything was paid, I was getting ready to go. And we became really really good friends. When I did come to Italy, that was 1986, I finished my studies and he was in Pieve di Soligo and he said “you must come to the hills”. So I went, and two days became like ten days. When I moved to Milano in 1988 I lived in Andrea Zanzotto’s apartment. Giovanni and I are still very good friends. I know the mother Marisa who is pretty old now but we always have lunch together. Let’s say they’re kind of a family for me. They accepted me into their family when I first came here. It’s been a great honour.
Both “Movin’ Round” and “My Path” strike me as very personal songs. Would you describe yourself as a restless soul, going from one place to another? Something I admire in you is a sense of hunger in the way you seem to go to great lengths in order to reach out to people. I could feel it when I saw your gig in Rome in 2019, and I can feel it in this album.
Yes, I’ve moved a lot, and I’m now living in my 23rd apartment. I don’t know if I’m a restless soul, I’m just very curious and I’m a bit of a nomad and a vagabond. It’s like the circus. The circus tent goes up and when it’s time to go you just close it up and you put it up somewhere else. What these songs came down to is I’m going to be 58 this year so there’s more to look back on and the reckoning or the realization I’m left with is that in the end my real home is me.
You say it in “My Missing Muse” that you are your own muse.
That happens when you don’t have a muse. For me the muse is always the partner or the husband and there are times when you don’t have that and you have to create it. You have to be it instead of projecting it into somebody innocent that maybe doesn’t want to be the muse. You have to go inward. I think my most melancholy song is “My Missing Muse” because it does go into that feeling of everything is just somehow flat when you don’t have a muse or someone to constantly interface with about your impressions of life.
I was intrigued by “I’m Selective”. I could sense that there was irony in the song and maybe even a particular feminine perspective about situations.
It’s a shift in perspective meaning you have to be choosy in relationships and you become a little bit more selective about what you put up with as you grow up. From a woman’s point of view, an emancipated feminist woman like me, it’s like a healthy warning “please be warned that I am selective”. Be careful how you treat me. A reckoning that you can choose to fall in love and fall in love over and over with the same person. It’s a choice. It’s not a duty. What it talks about is try to see things a little bit more from my side, because when you are on my side everything’s better. It’s really about an examination of relationship between two people. That’s the next single by the way.
It surely deserves to be the next single. What can you tell me about music videos?
I’ve been on a lot of sets of music videos, which in my opinion are small movie sets. Especially the videos that Delta V made at the time, between 2001 and 2004 — they were big budget videos. I made two albums with Delta V. Our first video was “Un’Estate Fa”, a remake of “La Belle Histoire” by Michelle Fugain. We did a cover of it. And that song shot to number one the summer of 2001. We were riding that wave of success and the video was made to look like a French film. We shot it in Cavi di Lavagna on the Riviera. Another video we did was for “Prendila Così”, a cover of the Lucio Battisti song, and it was inspired by the Coen brothers’ Fargo. It was shot in the snow, there was a murder, like in the film.
You duetted with Vinicio Capossela on his album Ovunque Proteggi, didn’t you?
Yes, I did. The song is called “Medusa Cha Cha Cha”. Vinicio asked me to duet with him after my former husband Giorgio Carlevaro, who is a filmmaker, had directed Vinicio’s first video “All’Una e Trentacinque Circa”. Vinicio Capossela is going to be performing at the Italian Pavillion at the EXPO in Dubai in March. I performed there in November with the Dining Rooms. A great experience. It wasn’t a classic concert because we were at the entrance to the pavilion. It was an aperitif concert outside, whereas Capossela will be performing in the Auditorium inside the pavilion.
