Italy’s The Silver Snails are a pop rock band having released their full-length debut album, The 7 Melodies, featuring eight tracks. The band is comprised of lead singer, Lucas Ward and his wife Elisa Fantini, and both take inspiration from the family’s rustic backdrop in the wine country of Romagna, Italy, and combine it with their contemporary sound that attracts a global audience.
Songs on The 7 Melodies, the group’s ambitious, harmonically rich debut album, are sung in English, French, Italian, Mandarin, and even a bit of Sanskrit. Their influences include The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie, Pink Floyd and other British musicians that are reflective throughout their music. Other influences include Beethoven, Irish, jazz and many other diverse genres.
The Silver Snails are exclusively premiering their new single “Beatrice Russo,” and Ward shares with our audience about the single below:
“Though complex and multi-layered underneath, “Beatrice Russo” is meant to be sweet and accessible to the listener. The complexity starts with the harmony. The song calls for chords moving every bar the whole song, over a completely original chord cycle in two parts (AB) modulated up a half-step (A’B’) and then repeated a third time in the original key. In reality the song doesn’t have a ‘key’ in the traditional sense, it simply has starting points and end-points and a precise sequence of chords based around chromatically descending bass-lines.
The chromatic descending bass thing I identify most closely with Jobim (e.g. ‘Corcovado’) but others have used it to give a sense harmonic momentum. At the same time, I wanted to create melodies which sound accessible and ‘tonal’ over this constantly moving, a-tonal chord train. Finally, I wanted to create separate ‘male’ and ‘female’ melodies which both interact in duet fashion as well as solo (for example the female takes the lead and with new melody during the middle A’B’ section). In addition, since the theme of the song is ‘impossible love’, a là Romeo & Juliet, I decided to make it an international love story, with my male lead in English and the female lead sung by Elisa in Italian.
A muse for the song was the film “Il Postino,” in which Pablo Neruda’s postman (Massimo Troisi) is inspired by his crush on a girl from his village (Maria Cucinotta) to compose his first ‘metaphor’. When pressed by the great poet to confess the name of his muse, it rolls off his tongue like fresh molasses: ‘Beatrice… Russo… ‘. We note that Beatrice was also the name of Dante’s love and muse (his avataric guide in ‘The Divine Comedy’ was Virgilio…
Though composed on the piano, “Beatrice Russo” is guitar-driven using 8th note picking-style comp. The song also features real drums and lush analog (‘real’) strings which recorded in Sarsina, Italy, along with all the other studio tracks.”
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