For goodness sake, it’s not like it should become a rule or, worse, a model: Mina is Mina, she only answers to herself. She has been making music since the late fifties, she is a true legend, a pioneer of revolutions in customs and this playing with silence and absence has been going on for a lifetime. It therefore makes no sense to take it as a symbol and think about how its is a viable alternative even today, in an era that imposes hyper-presence on artists. If anything, it’s the opposite: every time he sings, he comes out with a new album, like this one Lover’s gas72nd (!) in the studio of her career, well, even now that she has reached eighty, her attention should move elsewhere and the promotion – which she doesn’t do anyway, on the understanding that even don’t communicate And communicate – follows other rules, manages to make us perceive a movement of air.

Mina is an unsolved mystery

Let’s look around: it’s full of singers of an absolute level who at his age or before have lost their touch, who give up on unreleased songs because, come on, it’s not worth it. No Mina, she still has something shamanic, mystical: her new songs come out and that’s enough to make you feel tiny, participating in something bigger, immanent. How does he do it?

We don’t know. It is a mystery, in fact, that cannot be explained but what is there and it has to do first of all with her voice, the way she uses it, the chords she touches, rather than the media and non-media aura that has been generated around her. She makes the difference, the songs are a part of the larger whole and, it must be said, here alone they are not always up to par: in Lover’s gaswhich sees the light as a concept about timeless love, which aims for absolutes, wins a series of auteur pop standards, at least updated to the times in terms of (refined) production and arrangements, but often devoid of who knows which peaks. The flicker, more than that Throw it away written by Francesco Gabbani and chosen as the launch single, is Without hurting mewhich bears the signature of Elisa and is a sort of gospel that gradually catches fire with Mina’s interpretation. The rest proceeds between nocturnal atmospheres and some jazzy hits, empty shells in which, however, her voice inserts itself, and that’s where the magic starts. There time, above all, stops, and even in an era like this, of fast music, Mina who says Minaat his age, is still a spell: it makes you slow down, it works like a magnet, you don’t lose focus despite being, in fact, old-fashioned; and every time he sings, above all, it always happens something.

The key to resisting time

The truth, however, is that despite what he may seem in his clothes and in his time he is fine. The only concession, in recent years, has been the duet with Blanco, A bit of joy (2023), an episode played on a neutral field and which, if for him it was a great achievement, for her it served more than anything to underline his centrality in the Italian musical panorama even today – but precisely, there was no need . Lover’s gaswith its baroque salons that seem to come from who knows what era, instead highlights its freshness better than many other contemporary solutions, because if the songs in question belong to the past, and ok, the voice doesn’t, it is in the present and has evolved .

Just take a ride on it Without hurting me or on the cover of I won’t stop waiting for you by Fabio Concato, who opens the album, to understand. The interpretation, it is true, is always and in any case masterful (and oh well, we are talking about Mina, you might say), but the voice is not always as clean and, in fact, it tells more than one might think at first glance about the age that it lives, with the high notes that sometimes struggle, with the melancholy that only a certain experience and awareness can guarantee, as in the case of Concato’s piece. Formal perfection, here, has nothing to do with it and is no longer of interest: the album is based on the feelings, on the emotions it transmits. And it’s a courageous choice to show yourself like this, of course. But it is also his strength. So, here, decomposing – because that’s what we talk about: portraits, on portraits, on portraits – the image of Mina is only part of the discussion: if we then follow the voice, it seems to have her in front of us, as she is today . And when he sings, however, time stops.