Inside Donatella Rettore’s 1983 Country Concept Album 'Far West'
How the Italian singer paid homage to country music, musical theater, and spaghetti western through the electronic Italo disco sounds.
2024 appears to be the year where Americana and country fully transitioned from being corny to being mainstream cool: think of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter and Lana del Rey’s Lasso. Hell, even Ari Aster is directing a contemporary Western, starring Joaquin Phoenix, Pedro Pascal, and Emma Stone.
Country music did, somehow, penetrate the Italian music industry and that should not surprise us, given Italy’s robust Spaghetti Western tradition. In 1983, Donatella Rettore decided to write a country-infused concept album, aptly titled Far West, way before Madonna’s Music from 2000 and Lady Gaga’s Joanne from 2016, both completely developed along the country western aesthetics, themes and sound. “I wrote Far West because I was inspired to create a piece of musical theater,” Rettore tells Italian Disco Stories in an exclusive interview. “I wanted to write a musical that was reminiscent of older Spaghetti Western movies, and wanted to write a rock musical that had an underlying common thread, with costumes that would solidify the narrative.” In fact, when the preliminary promotion began in May 1983, Rettore appeared on the cover of the weekly TV Sorrisi e Canzoni in Western regalia.
Donatella Rettore’s Far West appeared in the aftermath of her world tour, when she gained star power in continental Europe and Japan and sold 3 million records. At that point together with her lifelong partner drummer Claudio Rego, she was openly experimenting with genres and drawing from international cultures in her song-writing world building: her previous album Kamimaze Rock’n’Roll Suicide explored Japanese philosophy and cultural signifiers. She had also left the record label Ariston in favor of Caterina Caselli’s CGD to release ambitious records. Teased by the single “Io ho te,” the album was framed, much like Evita in its first version, as a concept album primed for a musical-theater adaptation. The main characters are frontier-land heroines and antiheroines, whose stories Rettore tells and embodies to rock, synth pop, industrial, and Italo disco beats. Rettore attributes the variety of sounds (country, rock, and more) to the way musicals were structured at the time.
It was prime time for musicals: on top of the Broadway and West End musicals such as Evita, Cats, Starlight Express, and Les Misérables, the movie industry had been releasing a plethora of musical dramas and comedies, including The Village People’s Can’t Stop the Music, Olivia Newton John’s Grease and Xanadu, and the rock musical Streets of Fire. An Italian-made musical hinging on the Spaghetti Western tradition and Italy’s own adaptation of various international music genres fit right into this panorama.
The album, produced by Roberto Danè, was recorded using the latest synth technology which became a signature of the Italo disco sound that became popular from 1984 to 1987; including the electronic drum machine sensation Simmons and iconic synthesizers such as Fairlight, Oberheim and Croma.
“Rodeo” likens the persona uttering the lyrics to a crazed mare, who first acts like she’s the victim only to then assert herself. The synth-rock title track “Far West” paints the fictional world of that album in broad strokes, complete with “pioneers looking for gold” “the flooding Mississippi” and “[The Far West being] really meant for men.” In it, she also references “movies and comic books.” The song “La cantante del saloon” sounds suspiciously similar to Lady Gaga’s “Joanne” and has a saloon vocalist state that she never sees the sun. In “Ranch,” whose opening bars are reminiscent of Disney’s “I just can’t wait to be king” she takes on the persona of Lola Pink, a woman who, aided by copious amounts of beer, makes the best of her current predicament. “Can Can” is replete of speed-techno elements, while “Il Ponte dei Sospiri” is almost shoe-gaze-like in its slow, atmospheric use of synth.
So who are all those characters? “The crazed mare, Lola Pink, and the Saloon singer…they’re all me,” she says. “La cantante del saloon was inspired by the movie Bus Stop starring Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn has been a long-standing muse of mine: I feel kinship to her, both on an artistic and on a personal level.” Still, the lyrics are written from a male point of view. That is just a feature of the Italian language, where masculine is the default gender in grammar even when referring to a group of people, to a gender-neutral person, or an object. “The cowboy can be any gender, I did not want to give them one,” says Rettore.
The closer is “Sweetheart on Parade,” written for her by Elton John. It’s an elegiac torch song fit for a piano bar, and, compared to the rest of the tracks, it distinctively feels like those songs you hear during the end credits in a movie.
“I had a lot of fun writing this album, but I was in the process of changing record labels, so what ever I said and wrote about was scrutinized around the clock,” she tells us. “I did not feel as free as I used to, but by keeping my head down, I knocked down the fences and managed to finish the album without fetters.” Unfortunately, she had everything lined up save for a producer, so the musical never saw the light. “I do love that world, though, because, even to this day, we still live in the Far West,” she says. “Every nation of the world–and every person– has their own Far West. When something goes wrong, they take their frustration out on the court jester, or the artist.”
When it was originally released, the album included a giant poster of Rettore being rescued from her cowboy, chased by two drifters (among these Claudio Rego himself). Incorporating original artwork such as posters was a real art form very popular in the 80s and that unfortunately died with the crash of record sales.
Far West was reissued in late 2023 and is now available for purchase. It also includes a stunning revisited version of its lead single “Io Ho Te”. You can purchase the album reissue HERE.