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Damiano David, the hearthrob Italian musician and Måneskin frontman, is teasing his first solo project, an album with a 2025 release date, one song and video, at a time. September’s reveal was the epic ballad “Silverlines.” Today’s TGIF treat is the broody-ish “Born With a Broken Heart,” a Romeo’s lament to his would-be savior: “Baby, you can’t fix me / I was born with a broken heart.”
On the basis of these two tracks alone, it’s clear that David has successfully carved out a new niche for himself musically—and visually. The producers have also allowed the unique texture of the artist’s voice to break through the instrumentation at regular intervals.
David’s sartorial transformation, from Glam Rock and BDSM to a more tailored and retro look, is as exciting as his sonic experimentations, and it represents a coming-into-his-own as well as a coming of age. He arrived at the Vogue offices in a bleached leather jacket with studded and padded shoulders over a sports jersey with black pants and loafers. He had taken off rings and earrings, the only bling being his tooth jewels. He said his news style is “a result of what I did internally. I feel like I’ve matured a lot and I feel like I’m completely owning my age; I’m literally a young adult and so I want my image to project that idea that I now kind of have of myself. In the past it was not about that, [in Måneskin] it was about a cohesion with our music and equations even between ourselves…always respecting everybody’s taste. But I have always loved tailoring and suits and this more high hand way of dressing. I feel very comfortable in it.”
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In “Silverlines” David wears a strong-shouldered cropped jacket with high-waisted pants, a thin tie, his new-ish mustache, and what was known back in the day as a co-respondent shoe. “We wanted something that matched the song,” David said. “The song is very epic…so the suit needed to kind of match this energy, but without being too fancy or crazy.” In “Born With a Broken Heart,” the look is Hollywood casual: khakis, white shirt with sleeves rolled up, laced shoes. Both videos deal with performances, in keeping with David’s newfound interest in Broadway musicals. He also reports having “had a very intense emotional reaction watching The Greatest Showman…watching it, I felt like everything is possible. And I remember saying to my girlfriend, this makes me dream. And I started crying, crying, crying, crying.”
Song titles like “Born With a Broken Heart” might suggest struggle, and indeed, as the musician states, “the urge to write the album came from this really strong necessity of just sharing my thoughts with the world because it was becoming kind of a flat line emotionally.” Arriving in LA, sans entourage, and with no support system was scary at first, but David soon discovered it to be a land of opportunity. As in the American dream? “I don’t think it’s because of America, it’s because I was in a place that is not home for me, and I was alone,” he explained. “I found myself again because I had none of the demands that I usually had… I came with a dream and I kind of made it happen. So yeah, it was the land of dreams.”
While David says he and his stylist have taken inspiration from Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, he’s also “moving through eras.” That’s something the singer has in common with his friend Alessandro Michele, who outfitted Måneskin when he was at Gucci. David, who attended his fellow Roman’s Valentino debut, hopes they’ll work together again at some point. Currently, though he’s Diesel’s first-ever global ambassador; he made his Met Gala debut sporting a see-through get-up from the label.
In life, what you see isn’t always what you get; in the case of “Born With a Broken Heart,” what you hear isn’t what you might expect. The song title suggests sorrow, and that’s certainly there, but the track is a journey that brings you through to the other side of darkness. Asked about this duality, David had this to say: “There’s a lot of reasons why I make music, but I think the main one for me is that it gives me the chance to take things that are not as happy or positive, and kind of maneuver them in a way until they look pretty and they represent something beautiful.” Silver linings never sounded so good.
See Damiano David’s style evolution.
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