Paolo Conte

Rêveries

About this Album

“Imagine Randy Newman on a Fellini soundtrack. Imagine Sade or David Bowie crooning Nepolitan folk songs. Imagine gutbucket New Orleans jazz crossing with the tarantella. At different moments, Mr. Conte’s music suggests each of these things.” —New York Times

Following on the heels of two highly successful US tours following his 1998 US debut, The Best of Paolo Conte, Conte returned to the US market in 2003 with Rêveries, featuring 16 brand-new recordings of Conte classics, including four tracks drawn from earlier European-only releases.

Voted Best of the Year by both The New Yorker and Rolling Stone, which dubbed him “Italian by birth, singular in cool,” Paolo Conte’s Best of collection was his first US release after nearly two decades as a best-selling artist throughout Europe. After more than 25 years, his songwriting, characterized by an amalgam of styles and influences, has found an ever-growing legion of fans in the US.

The 2003 release, Rêveries, features Conte’s trademark smoky voice, a piano style that wanders from jazz to honky-tonk to cabaret, his weathered Romantic’s view of the world, and lyrics that mix seduction and nostalgia in ever-unique ways. There are fresh versions of older songs with different—and typically canny—arrangements featuring Conte in front of his virtuosic sidemen on accordian, sax, guitar, bass, and drums.

As the New York Times has said, “Mr. Conte both embodies Italy and transcends it. His songs, redolent of vintage American jazz and South American tangos, German cabaret and French chanson, conjure voices from all over the map as channeled through the ancient soul of an Italian poet … Mr. Conte’s music is his own.”