The words of Franco Battiato, the study

Life is love. This is how Franco Battiato sang, over the years, the miracle of existence and of the world: describing a Universe in which wonder and mysticism mix with listening to the absolute and to time. Even the statistical analysis of the words used in his songs reveals the beauty of his inner world, revealing his desires, dreams and fears. Baia, business unit of the United Group www.unitedspa.it, analyzed all the terms of almost 150 songs by Battiato, discovering the words most used by the singer-songwriter to communicate the richness of his world. of his texts, there are three terms used most frequently: “life”, “love” and “world”, cited respectively 53, 51 and 42 times. And this is because for the Sicilian artist it was love that gave meaning to life and to the whole world. And again, in the fourth and fifth place we find the words “when” and “time”: two terms that open reflection to mystery of eternity and of the ephemeral duration of our life and our feelings. And then, as can be seen in the word cloud that highlights the words most used by Battiato, the term “eyes” appears, because seeing accompanies listening and contemplation. But, after “eyes”, here is the word that seems to tell the last years of the artist’s life: that “alone” that speaks of loneliness, nakedness and poverty. A “solo” that reveals the experience of the human being who must face his destiny, accepting the hardest and most unavoidable challenges, including death and illness, in solitude. It is not loneliness, however, that literally has the last word. In fact, in the ranking of the most frequent terms, we discover three words that speak of hope: “still”; “Earth” and “always”. “Always” and “still”: almost a prelude to an otherness that the singer-songwriter perceived, but which he felt embodied and present in the “earth” on which he walked, and not in an ethereal and too far beyond. “It is impressive discover how the statistical analysis of the words used in Battiato’s texts says so much about Battiato’s poetry ”, comments Andrea Carobene, director of Baia. And this perhaps also explains why Battiato himself was fascinated by numbers and mathematics, to the point of concluding the song “Phenomenology” of the Fetus album with a trigonometry formula that, to him, perhaps reminded him of the double helix of DNA, that is the origin of life. Because life is love.