Info

category: CD album

label: Decca/Sugar

original release date: 03/13/2012

released in: US / Canada

art direction: Pat Barry

photo: Jayme Thornton

graphic design: Sean Mosher-Smith at the Conspiracy

Notes

In assembling "Steppin’ On Water", Elisa drew largely from Ivy (a collection of folk-tinged songs released in Italy in November 2010). The 11-track album also includes two songs plucked from the soundtrack of Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You (a new film helmed by Italian director from Roberto Faenza and starring Marcia Gay Harden, Ellen Burstyn, Lucy Liu, Peter Gallagher, and Aubrey Plaza). Featuring music by famed Italian composer Andrea Guerra and lyrics by Michele Von Büren, “Love Is Requited” and “Apologize” kick off Steppin’ On Water and set the tone for the rest of the beautifully bittersweet record. “Even though I didn’t write the songs for the movie, they were very much in the same vein as the songs I was working on at the time, which was a magical coincidence,” says Elisa. “It was like pulling on a dress that was made just for me.”

Indeed, the pairing of “Love Is Requited” (a dreamy, acoustic-guitar-kissed meditation on renewing one’s faith in love) and “Apologize” (a jaunty, jazzy number with a 1930s feel) neatly embodies Steppin’ On Water’s melting together of wistful and whimsical. “When I was putting this record together, I chose the songs that were more emotional and very personal,” says Elisa. “At the same time, the album has a sort of purity and lightness of mood.” The birth of her first child (Emma Cecile) in 2009 was essential to helping Elisa infuse her songs with a soulful simplicity, she points out. “There’s a certain peace that comes from being in the presence of a young soul, a person for whom everything is so mysterious and new,” says Elisa, whose husband Andrea Rigonat serves as guitarist, drummer, and arranger for several tracks on Steppin’ On Water. “There’s also some mysticism to the whole experience of being a mother, and I think that went into the record as well.”

Produced by Elisa herself, Steppin’ On Water shines sunny and bright on tracks like “Nostalgia” (a perfect pop gem that opens with a cascade of guitars, its sweetly affirming chorus promising that “life is a song”) and “So Much of Me” (a shimmering, slow-building piano ballad originally written by Italian pop-rock phenom Luciano Ligabue and translated into English by von Büren). “I’m so happy with the way ‘So Much of Me’ turned out,” Elisa notes. “Luciano is this huge, amazing rock star, and I love the way Michele and I took the song down to Earth and made it super-simple.” Equally dazzling is the album-closing update of “Dancing,” a stripped-down live version playfully accented by finger-snapping and the twinkle of glockenspiel.

Elsewhere on Steppin’ On Water, Elisa’s offerings take on a more melancholy mood “Lullaby,” for instance achieves a haunting beauty thanks to its hushed vocals and fluttering strings, while Elisa’s potent voice often sounds choked-up and fragile on “Forgiveness” (a gently soaring track featuring the Italian children’s choir Piccolo Coro Artemìa di Torviscosa). The choir also lends its angelic aura to the soothing “One Step Away” and to “Fresh Air,” a delicate yet deeply moving number with the unnerving refrain of “Tell me what is this, is it an earthquake?” And before slipping into the carefree spirit of “Dancing,” Elisa serves up a rendition of Queens of the Stone Age’s “I Never Came” that’s stark and strikingly tender.