This article is centered on a specific moment in Lucio Dalla’s career, a major singer-songwriter in Italy. Unlike many cantautori of his generation, who authored lyrics and music from their beginnings, Lucio Dalla gradually became a  cantautore, in the most restrictive sense of the word – a singer who interprets songs he composed and wrote. He started out in the end of the 1950s as a jazz clarinet player. To become a singer, he needed the intervention of his first  mentor, Gino Paoli. Then, Dalla gradually turned his hands to music writing, together with various lyricists and with increasing personal involvement. This article first retraces this process and its various stages, and then focuses  on a particularly important moment: the transition to writing lyrics after the collaboration between Lucio Dalla and the poet Roberto Roversi, between 1973 and 1976. The songs of these albums were created following radical rules:  Roversi wrote texts without any particular metric, Dalla was in charge of finding the regularities which are essential to a musical setting, barely communicating with the poet during the recording process. The collaboration with  Roversi gave Dalla the impetus to dare writing his own lyrics, but also taught him a number of literary tools and techniques that later strongly characterized his style as a singer-songwriter. This study sheds a new light on two  peculiar features that Dalla drew from this experience: the ability to play with elasticity in the process of setting poetic text to music, and the ability to offer portraits and stories in an extremely synthetic way.

Since 1974, and to this day, the Club Tenco of Sanremo – an institution founded by music enthusiasts in the wake of the suicide of singer-songwriter Luigi Tenco in 1967 – has organized the “Rassegna della canzone d’autore” (Auteur song festival), a gathering place for the canzone d’autore community. Through the discourses it has produced and disseminated over half a century through its publications, and through the “Rassegna” itself – still today the most important festival for Italian singer-songwriters – the Club Tenco has championed a problematic equation between authorship and aesthetic value, and has established itself as a fundamental gatekeeper of taste in the field of canzone...