Fortunato Durutti Marinetti Interview: “There’s humility and absurdity involved”

Under the Fortunato Durutti Marinetti moniker, Daniel Colussi has developed an uncanny knack for making the past feel like the present. Many of the protagonists in his songs, deep in thought, slightly aloof, and hideously cynical.

From many of his observation, the Turin-born, Toronto-based songwriter has a talent to spin a yarn. It started with the baroque-infused debut, Desire (2020), before Colussi went up a gear with his follow-up, Memory’s Fool (2022). A series of string-laden serenades that stretched beyond your four-minute folk trope, aesthetically it wasn’t a world away from Bob Dylan’s recent works. Songs to let wash over you, but not without some dark twists and turns.

It was Memory Fool’s closing track, I Declare, where Colussi found the brightest spark, and it was that light that reached all the way to his next release, Eight Waves in Search of an Ocean – an album littered with wit, inflected with humour and curled with scorn.

Like Memory’s Fool, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean was produced by Sandro Perri, and musically, it was a marvel, too. Colussi, backed by a swathe of guests who provided rich beddings of strings and brass, which made the whole vibe feel like an embittered lounge band holding their audience in contempt. It was darkness at the door but with a gentle knock, and Fortunato Durutti Marinetti’s new LP, Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter is every bit as shadowy. Once again, Colussi is on form with songs that make you laugh, cry, slightly squirm and nod sternly in affirmation.

Opening gambit, Full of Fire is the burner its title suggests. With Luan Phung’s snaking guitars, Alex Fournier’s hooping bass lines and Brandon Gibson De Groote’s swooning strings, Colussi orchestrates something akin to a Destroyer-inspired indie opera that ushers in the apocalypse (“Everything should be burned… nothing should remain”).

And A Perfect Pair sees a couple revelling in similar environments (“I don’t know why everyday is so perfectly fucked ”), while the funk-laden Beware sees Colussi at his pessimistic best. His humour, dry as a bone and alongside guest vocalist, Victoria Cheong, the pair deliver more observations that cut through like a knife, (“Average does not kill / It wounds for life … Leave stupid dreamers to dream stupid dreams“).

Again, the rich balladry of Do You Ever Think? sees Colussi leaning into his backing band, unfurling a story of a protagonist tying themselves up in knots. A Rambling Prayer is cut with similar cloth; the character, sick with worry about things that matter little in the grand scheme of things.

While the piano-led closer, Funeral, sees Colussi channelling a Waitsian Closing Time-era lament, it’s Call Me the Author that seals the deal. Like all good pensmiths, a bit of self-deprecation never goes astray, (“You could even call me a dirty bird”), and like the rest of the songs on Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, they play out just as much as essays or a book of short stories as they do songs. It makes the Fortuanto Durutti Marinetti experience a multi-faceted one.

Earlier this month in the lead-up to the release of Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter, Colussi answered a series of questions about his journey as an artist, his influences, his writing process and of course, his latest conquest committed to tape.

S13: Originally hailing from Turin, was Italian music among some of your earliest memories of music?

Daniel Colussi: “My parents loved music and there was music in the house, but not Italian music. My Mom loved Elvis and golden oldies. My Dad is a jazz head and also studied literature and poetry so he totally embraced Dylan. My earliest musical memory is getting lost in Roy Orbison, playing his cassettes and staring at his poster I had on the wall in my bedroom. He had these incredible shaggy dog songs about the outcasts and losers who do not get the girl in the end. It totally affected me on a hardcore level. I was born in ’82, so I was at just the right age to get caught up in Roy Orbison’s final chapter in the late eighties.”

S13: Do you think your earliest influences remain with you, or have they changed over the years?

DC: “I don’t think so, no. There’s also a difference between being a music listener and being someone who writes music. There’s lots of stuff I listen to and enjoy and worship that I don’t think really enters into what I do in my own songs. You go through many weird phases in life.” 

S13: Can you tell us about the process behind Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter?

DC: “The previous record, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean, was a joyful process to make with everyone involved, and I learned so much from Sandro Perri, who produced it. But it was a record with a very intentional pivot towards different sounds and instrumentation that I wasn’t planning on pursuing beyond that album. So writing the stuff that became Bitter Sweet, I felt like the path forward was to lean hard into whatever are my familiar habits and handicaps as a songwriter and just ride those towards some conclusion. So, for me that meant 6/8 time signatures, long-ish songs with no real chorus, lots of descending major seventh chord progressions, lots of flowy words.

“It only made sense to give Brandon full reign to write big sweeping string parts, because he can do all that. So I left space in the songs for that and at points used these almost kind of schlocky, cliched chord progressions that I felt Brandon could really run with and have fun with, which he did. He wrote and played these eight-part violin/viola/cello parts that just cascade down over the songs. And generally, I tried to cultivate a vibe where all the players could really stretch out in their own styles. I told Alex Fournier to take liberties with the bass, don’t feel hemmed in, and he did, he totally ran with it and gave that amazing performance on the album theme. Everyone involved worked really hard and fast. The recordings are all first or second or third takes done over a few weekends.

“Lyrically, as time goes on, I’m more inclined to push the envelope to see what I can get away with. So for this album, on the romantic songs I went for a kind of hopeless-teenager-in-love aesthetic, where the sense of desire and devotion is over the top, unrealistic. For other songs I wanted to bury nasty sentiments inside drippingly, sweepingly sweet chords.

“Writing the album, my mental image was of a bathtub filled to overflowing with sweet things – wine and booze, hot chocolate, whipping cream, canned fruit salad, chunks of tiramisu floating around. Sweet things taken to grotesque extremes. A little bit like the cover of the Royal Trux album, Sweet Sixteen.”

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S13: Your previous release, Eight Waves In Search Of An Ocean, was such an under the radar release. Here you seem even more confident and upbeat. Was that something you wanted to capture with these songs?

DC: “To be honest, by the standards of my own music-making, Eight Waves… was the most high-profile thing I’ve done. Quindi and Soft Abuse really supported the album. Writing the songs that became Bitter Sweet, I was just doing the same thing I always do, which is attempt to excite myself, surprise myself, push myself, freak myself out. A few of my friends said they initially found this album more upbeat, but I never thought of it that way. The first song is kind of about a romance that leads to mutually assured destruction. The last song is me dictating the terms of my own funeral.”

S13: On Call Me the Author, it epitomises a lot of your songs, which have always contained unique stories and poetic depth. Is fiction and poetry something you’ve always been interested in?

DC: “I’m someone who’s played in bands since I was fifteen, and I’ve cycled through all these eras of music-making. Playing in hardcore bands high school, playing noise, playing drones, playing power pop, playing folky DIY stuff. And always in a collaborative capacity with other people. I’m a really late bloomer in that I didn’t actually start writing my own songs until I was in my early thirties. I don’t know why. I just never pictured myself being the singer in front of a band, commanding an audience’s attention. So once I started approaching music in the singer-songwriter mode, the only way to do it was to try and foreground the lyrics, because I do like playing with words and I’m not a person with an exceptional voice or advanced guitar skills who can dazzle. So, every song kind of functions as a self-contained poetic essay for me.”

S13: On Beware, the line, “Medusa’s stare will find you across the room” reminds me of Destroyer’s most brutal moments. Is he someone you consider an influence?

DC: “I lived in Vancouver for over a decade, I saw lots of Destroyer shows, I got to know several people in that band, I’ve listened to the records, and last autumn I opened a week of Destroyer’s tour, so yes, it’s a band that’s definitely familiar to me. Nowadays I think what I value in Dan Bejar’s writing is that with every album, I really believe in his commitment to pursuing whatever fascination or impulse or concept it is that’s gripping him at that time. Day to day I don’t like to take myself too seriously, but I do find it meaningful and worthwhile to go as hardcore as I can into whatever my own weird trip is, to follow that towards some conclusion – and I see that in Destroyer. I identify with that kind of mission of intent.”

S13: Do you write lyrics before the music?

DC: “I write the lyrics and the music in parallel. For the first couple of FDM albums, I was happy to work on a big, long sheet of lyrics and then figure out chord and melodies more or less after the fact that could prop it that up. Like a big plinth with the shiny object on top, the two parts clearly delineated. But now I want the words and instrumentation to be really thoroughly imbricated. I want it to all come together as single dense mass so that the listener can’t easily separate one aspect from the other.

“I went through a deep David Sylvain phase from around 2022-2024 and he’s made an observation about the classic Dylan type song wherein the lyrics are basically a poem that kind of floats over a melodic cycle. It made me realise I’d fallen into that mode on a lot of songs. Which is fine. But now I’m trying to work on the words and the chords in close parallel, so that it’s all one humid jungle stew that the listener has to enter and deal with. That’s something his music does really well.” 

S13: There are many voices that accompany you on this album. By each guest musician adding their own colour to these songs, do you think it results in your most diverse set of songs so far?

DC: “Each FDM album has been a process of me loosening control, letting other peoples’ presence guide things, letting the group process determine the outcome. I find my own voice and presence can be overbearing, a bit exhausting, so increasingly I really want the albums to be bear the mark of all the players and studio people involved. Bitter Sweet is the most extreme statement of me submerging myself somewhere into the middle distance of this big band. Although right now we’re currently partway through making the next album which is pushing things even further in this direction. I find it really thrilling to put my trust in other people and see where they take it. 

“The other really important thing I want to say is that all the people I play with are much, much more talented players than I am, so they elevate the songs way beyond my own capacities. I am incredibly grateful that all these sweet people came together to make this album with me in a tiny little attic that was ridiculously cramped and uncomfortably hot. All the people who worked on this album gave so many gifts towards the final rendered thing.”

S13: Your characters feel inspired by a lot of reconnaissance. Kind of like a person propped at the end of the bar observing scenarios and creating stories from them. Would that be accurate?

DC: “I don’t know. I guess the songs are observational. I definitely don’t write songs in bars. I think there was a point years ago where I thought what I was doing was essentially a form of journalism, but I don’t see it that way now. I don’t know what the rules are for responsible journalism.  

“I recently read Rachel Kushner’s book Creation Lake, and the perspective and voice of the narrator of that novel I really identify with. It’s similar to what I’m going for. And I really love the tone and language of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection. I’m trying to do something like that in songs, I think.”

S13: Do you work on writing every day, and do you need certain things around you to work effectively?

DC: “I’m a person with a full-time day job, so I’m not tinkering on songs all day every day. I enjoy approaching music as a fairly disciplined practice. I like sitting at a table with a guitar and a keyboard and an open Word doc, just trying to make something cool happen. Sometimes it’s agonising, which is fine. There’s humility and absurdity involved. Writing songs isn’t supposed to be some algorithmically efficient process flicking a switch, pumping out banal shit. It’s got to involve committing a lot of time where nothing happens. But sitting and staring at the wall for a long time is a valuable and worthwhile thing to do. I don’t think there are special ingredients or conditions required for me to work on songs, personally. It’s more about devoting the time to really thinking about what I’m trying to do and going back again and again to edit ruthlessly. Questioning things and hacking at things.”

S13: How important is it to have support from a label like Quindi?

DC: “I’m 43 and I’ve been playing in DIY bands since I was fifteen, so I’m always extremely grateful for any kind of support or attention that drifts my way. Anyone who listens to my stuff or buys an album or comes to a show or any random stranger who sends me some message – I’m grateful. Whatever goodwill comes my way I humbly appreciate.

“Quindi, specifically, has become a dear close friend and confidante – we talk shit daily and make each other laugh, so I absolutely value that. But I’m also eternally grateful to Bobo Integral and Soft Abuse for taking the chance on releasing my second record on LP – that was huge for me— and also to Second Spring for re-issuing my first cassette onto LP. And now there’s We Are Time, who are co-releasing this new one with Quindi and are really supporting this new record, which is major for me and I am grateful to the max.

“I think running a vinyl label in 2025 is a form of mental illness – so much money and stress and bullshit, such little reward. Almost zero glory. A million demos coming in through email every day. I don’t know why anyone would do it. But I’m incredibly grateful for the insanity and psychosis of the labels that have supported me because at the end of the day I am a vinyl person. I’ve done years of self-releasing split 7”s and cassettes and basically just giving them all away; some label support feels validating.”

S13: Starting with Turin but ending with Toronto. How much do you think it informs your work now?

DC: “I’ve lived in Toronto for five years and I’ve found it really easy and fluid to meet cool people to work with on FDM stuff. Most music people here aren’t uptight. They’re excited to do shit. And there are so many people here making really good work. And there’s also a lot of little studios, too. So all of that’s huge to me. The city feels like this open field of possibility.

“On the other hand, Toronto and the province of Ontario as a whole love to score goals on themselves. Toronto’s sort of this big, ugly pit that’s surprisingly expensive to live in. And any small, progressive step forward inevitably gets followed by a big step backward. Like a lot of places in the world right now, it feels like the only political concept in the air is to give away public goods in a fire sale in the hopes that Amazon or a mining company will show up to provide a few shitty jobs. That’s the going political vision here and it informs the music I write. So yes, I do think that right now, what’s good and inspiring about this place as well as what’s dysfunctional and stupid are all informing my work.”

Bitter Sweet, Sweet Bitter is out Friday via Quindi Records / We Are Time. Purchase from Bandcamp.