Paolo Conte
Asti is a town in Piedmont known for a sweet sparkling wine and for a lawyer who kept a grand piano ... Paolo Conte practiced law there for years and wrote songs for other singers on the side, and he was past forty before he stood up and sang them himself ... The voice he had been keeping back was, as everyone says, a gravel baritone that half speaks and half sings ... it turned out to be the point ...
Via con me is from Paris Milonga, 1981 ... As a single it did not sell ... The album became a slow long-seller on the strength of this one track, which went on to be the song people know him by, in films, in adverts, in bars where nobody knows his name ... Come away with me, the title says ... is an invitation, and the whole song is the tone of voice a person would use to make it ...
Under him is a piano vamp that swings like something from a cabaret fifty years earlier, with a muted trumpet and a clarinet coloring the edges ... a small band making a deliberate throwback in the year of the synthesizer ... Conte was not trying to sound like 1981 ... he was trying to sound like the room he wanted to be in ...
We could find no sentence of his about writing it ... he will talk about Paris, and about songwriting in general, and never about this one ... which is how a lawyer treats his best case ... he lets it speak for itself ...