Soundtrack

You Don't Need to Know the Words

Italian versions of Neil Diamond songs are why I write about music at all

I didn’t understand most of what she said. But we had a full conversation anyway—because a song showed up at the right moment.

bref:

A song did what my Italian couldn’t—carry a conversation. And then some great songs from the 1960s and 1980s, in Italian.

I keep writing about music on here and I’m not even sure I’ve ever properly said why. It’s not the stuff that gets the most clicks. It just… lands differently. Closer. Quieter. People don’t always react, but you can feel it connect.

This morning it was Gianni Morandi singing Se perdo anche te—his version of Solitary Man by Neil Diamond.

I heard it in this Italian bulk wine shop—one of those places that feels like it shouldn’t exist anymore.

You walk in with whatever container you’ve got, and they just fill it. Cheap, good wine. No ceremony, some nice light chatter back and forth about…stuff, then on your way. The kind of place France used to have in cities around wine regions and now mostly doesn’t.

Solitary Man - Neil Diamond (1971, live)

In this home, we like Neil Diamond. Overwrought, dramatic, maybe overly sincere with thick, unmoving Michael Landon hair.

Talk about what?

My Italian is… functional, at best. Enough to buy wine, not enough to explain anything. But then that song came on. And I’m listening to Neil Diamond in Italian.

She saw that I recognized it. And the rest of our conversation—in Italian—was about what that song was, who the artist was and some other stuff about Morandi and how much her parents used to listen to him all the time, etc.

I didn’t catch it all, but we had a great talk.

And that’s kind of it.

These moments don’t look like much from the outside. A song you half-know, in a language you barely speak, in a little shop you probably couldn’t have in the US for some reason.

But they accumulate. They connect.

stitches & buttons

People always talk about language learning like it’s discipline, repetition, grammar. It’s not wrong. But you need these tiny positive associations. Something that makes you want to come back to the sound of it. Otherwise it’s just work.

Anyway. That song’s been on repeat all morning. And it feels like one of those small stitches again—bringing the language together just a little bit more, another connection.

Solitary translation

Late ’60s, music moved by translation. Not imitation—adaptation. You take something like Solitary Man, reshape it into Se perdo anche te, and it belongs somewhere else.

Morandi did a lot of this with Neil Diamond’s songwriting. This is a rare translation into Italian, or any other languages. Most times, Diamond’s songs are just covered in English.

It’s not just a cover. Back then, it was more like… relocation. Music moving across borders, made to feel local.