2016
I Dreamed An Island

I wanted the album to end with a plea. Oiseau, written the day after the 2015 Paris attacks while I was on tour in Tunisia, describes a sleeping man caught in a nightmare of terrorist violence . In it, he hears the hollow thud of bullets, of bombs exploding, of bodies falling. From the darkness of his dream, he calls to a songbird outside his window to wake him from the nightmare. He begs the bird to sing to him, to bring him back to the light, to wake him with song. Music is his only hope.

2016
I Dreamed An Island

"Drone” riconduce l’album all’attualità di un attacco di droni in Siria.

Although I Dreamed An Island is inspired by the lost multi-cultural idyll of 12th century Norman Sicily, I wanted the album to flow, both musically and narratively between the past and the contemporary. Drone, as its title suggests, brings us back to the present day where silent unmanned aircraft have replaced the dagger and sword and the thunder of galloping horses as the new messengers of death, wreaking havoc in the night. The song describes the aftermath of a drone strike in Syria.

2016
I Dreamed An Island

lyrics in Salentino by Mauro Durante

More and more walls are going up around the world. Whether it’s Donald Trump’s idea for a great wall of Mexico or the Calais fence, stories of structures or barriers that separate one people from another fill the airwaves and screens of the world’s daily news. On my Island utopia, child-like as it may be, the walls would all come down.