If you passed Edoardo D’Erme on the street, you wouldn’t know that he’d just sold out a tour for an album before its release. You mightn’t even upon hearing the name Edoardo D’Erme. D’Erme, better known by his stage name Calcutta, is beloved exactly for how unassuming he is. During interviews, he hides behind dark sunglasses and a signature flat-cap–not with the demeanor of a celebrity hiding from attention, but more that of a tortoise trying to suck his head back into his shell. His interviewers are perpetually trying to suck him back out. During a recent interview for Radio Deejay, the host Linus opened with a reductive but not inaccurate summary of D’Erme’s public personality: “We’re about to do one of those interviews which are a bit difficult… because Calcutta doesn’t talk much.”

On the night of his second concert date in Rome, near his native Latina, the 34-year-old walks onto the stage with much the same demeanor. There is a moment of confusion as the crowd catches up, only realizing he’s there because of the ripples of chatter making their way through the 11,000-large audience. Without the aid of the screens, you might, at first, struggle to pick him out from the band. You might also struggle to judge the weather by his outfit. His face is, once again, obscured by a beanie and huge tinted sunglasses; he layers a t-shirt under a leather gilet. His complete lack of arrogance makes you almost inclined to underestimate his talent and sheer magical ability to connect with people. As he launches into the first few notes of 2minuti, it becomes clear that every single person knows his songs front to back–and back to front. We sing along for the duration of the concert as one voice. 

Calcutta, however, remains at odds with his commercial success. The cover of his first official album features a D’Erme lookalike standing in a crowd and holding up a banner with the album’s title: Mainstream. In October, Calcutta was invited by the Italian broadcasting company, RAI, to perform a surprise concert on the roof of the Radio Rai in Rome, inspired by the Beatles’ 1969 performance on the rooftop of Apple Corps building in London. In the same month, he told la Repubblica that he suffers when he’s the center of attention. The concert was promoted largely via the artist’s cryptic Instagram stories, which is his most regular and direct method of communication with his 600k followers. He uses Instagram as if he had only thirty, answering questions with a characteristic bluntness. “How come no features on the new album?”someone asks. “It didn’t happen,” comes his reply. “Did you cry while you were writing the lyrics?” asks another. “It happened,” D’Erme responds. When asked if he would participate in the Sanremo musical festival in 2024–the longest running televised music festival in the world, where artists from Andrea Bocelli to Måneskin have performed, D’Erme answers, “Too stressful and complicated.” It’s said that the name Calcutta was chosen more or less at random.

Though globally Calcutta would be classified as “indie”, Italians first and foremost would group him with the “cantautori”, the equivalent of “singer-songwriters” in English. The term–used both as a genre and for a type of musician–most strongly evokes the evergreen Italian voices of the 1960s and 70s and the tradition of the “canzone d’autore”, or “author’s song”, the music written and interpreted by a cantautore. Principal members of the genre–among them Rino Gaetano, Paolo Conte, Fabrizio De André, Lucio Battisti, and the “Prince of Singer-Songwriters” Francesco De Gregori–are all known for, in broad strokes, their lyricism and storytelling, emotional depth, and social and political commentary. The cantautori have given Italy its sound–the one that comes to mind when you think of Italian music. 

What the singers of yesteryear and Calcutta have in common–and what makes their music resonate–is something very simple: their music is Italian music written for Italians, drawing upon the Italian experience. They are ballads about the deep, yet complicated, affection many Italians feel for their country. While English-language pop music has a larger, more diverse market and global appeal, producing music that resonates wholly and deeply with a particular audience is perhaps more challenging artistically–and certainly less attractive commercially.

In a recent interview with la Reppublica, Calcutta was asked about his relationship to the cantautore label: “It’s a word that I don’t use, but if others use it, it doesn’t bother me. It’s just a word.” Regardless, with his influence, the word is evolving to mean new and exciting things for Italian music while retaining its roots in the cantautori tradition. Speaking with la Repubblica, Calcutta cites Italian pop music of the 60s and 70s (prime time for the cantautori) as inspiration for his new album, Relax, as well as the Japanese electronic band, Yellow Magic Orchestra. “Giro Con Te” uses a mixture of software synthesizers, a Soviet drum machine from before the fall of the Berlin wall, and a vintage WASP synthesizer, which together result in a sound that is reminiscent of the cantautore Lucio Battisti in the late 70s. 

Riccardo Zanotti, songwriter and member of the well-known indie rock band Pinguini Tattici Nucleari, cites Calcutta as the main inspiration for his return to the stage and credits him with bringing a new Italian music scene along with him. When Calcutta finally found commercial success in 2015 with his album Mainstream, he gave musicians like Zanotti a new optimism about the creative opportunities in Italian music.

Like the original cantautori, Calcutta is an expert storyteller, and his lyrics are pithy and evocative. He covers love, life, boredom, indifference, nostalgia, and sex with both elegance and sarcasm. That said, amongst sophisticated metaphors and heartbreaking poetry are everyday colloquialisms and humor that prevent any hint of self-indulgence or moodiness. Some of my favorites: “Perché tu te ne vai? Spezzandomi come pane carasau?” from Allegria, which translates as “Why are you leaving? Breaking me like carasau bread?”–the cited carb being a thin, crisp Sardinian bread also called “carta di musica” or sheet music. In Arbre Magique, he describes the romantic mood being killed by the scent of a particular type of disposable air freshener popular in Italian car washes, Arbre Magique. 

Where Calcutta might set himself apart from the cantautori of decades prior is in his approach to politics. He claims to be less direct, preferring to take a lighthearted and humorous approach–which often happens to be the way politics enters everyday life. In Controtempo, he sings “non ero mai finito a letto con una di destra”, meaning “I’ve never ended up in bed with someone from the right.”  He pokes fun at Italy’s socio-political climate with “ho fatto una svastica in centro a Bologna ma era solo per litigare”, describing the narrator drawing a swastika in the center of Bologna, a city well-known for its leftist politics and one recognized globally as a UNESCO City of Music; Calcutta has called the Emilia-Romagnan capital home for several years, as did Lucio Dalla famously. While there is fortunately no swastika drawn in the center of Bologna, you can see the lyrics to Calcutta’s Del Verde graffitied on the walls of Via Guglielmo Oberdan. 

Humorous jabs also come for Italy’s mainstream music. The choral harmonies of Coro, the opener of his concerts, make self-referential fun of the commercialisation of popular music: “Se non esistessero I soldi, Noi due dove saremmo? Non si farebbe Sanremo. Forse è anche meglio così.” “If money didn’t exist, where would we be? You wouldn’t have Sanremo. Maybe it’s better that way.” 

The sold-out shows and popularity somehow don’t add any polish to Calcutta; when he makes jokes like the above and pokes fun at an industry of which he is becoming an increasingly big part, there isn’t a moment when you question his sincerity or self-awareness. He’s certainly not a star, in the way we understand celebrity these days, nor is he even really the star of his own show: his music is. He frequently lets the crowd take over singing, at one point kneeling at the edge of the stage and holding out the microphone like a religious offering towards the mass of people gathered in front of him. This isn’t a gesture of arrogance but an acknowledgment of the fact that, with mainstream success, the “canzone d’autore”, the “author’s song”, no longer belongs to the author. It belongs to the listener.