Three years since his second no 1 on the Official Albums Chart with Europiana, Jack Savoretti has released his eighth studio album, Miss Italia, earlier this week. 

‘Since I started making music, a lot of people have said “When are you going to do an Italian album?” or “You should do an Italian album”,’ says Savoretti, ‘and I’ve always said I didn’t want to ever do it just for the sake of doing it. It was going to have to mean something.’

Kickstarting his 2024 tour in Switzerland last month, the London singer-songwriter reveals the inspiration behind his first Italian-language album and its personal significance in a period of loss. 

‘About two and a half years ago my father passed away, and my father was the anchor to my relationship with Italy, with that little marina of an idea that was Italy. If I thought of my father, I thought of Italy and if I thought of Italy, I thought of my father. So, when he passed, I had two options: I just wouldn’t be going to Italy at all anymore and would lose it in my life or I could take it head-on and really get to know my own “Italianity” in a different way. And that’s what I chose to do. When you lose a parent it’s cataclysmic, and I couldn’t just use the old ways to deal with it. I needed something that was going to draw stuff out of me.’

Relocating to Italy for a year to surround himself with the Italian language, Savoretti used his father’s mother-tongue as a way to return to his musical beginnings. 

‘If you’re wearing a suit or if you’re wearing jeans and a T-shirt, that does change you slightly,’ he explains. ‘Well, I think aesthetically and superficially, language does too – I think even musically. I rediscovered poetry through writing in Italian again, and that’s where I started out – with poetry. I like to use poetry in my storytelling. Over the past few years I got a little bit colloquial in my songwriting, which I like doing, it’s what I wanted to do right then and there. But now I’m at a phase in my life where I just want to find the majesty of words and put those in songs. And Italian helped me do that.’

The title of his newest album, Miss Italia, is in fact a play on the words “I miss Italia” (‘It has nothing to do with the beauty pageant,’ the musician jokingly confirms). 

Savoretti’s personal and artistic connection to Italy is well known thanks to his partnership with Portofino Dry Gin and becoming an ambassador for IWC Schaffhausen’s Portofino collection – ‘I’ve become the Portofino poster boy!’ Savoretti laughs. The village, just south of Genoa on the Italian Riviera coastline, was the setting of Savoretti’s childhood summers: ‘I will always look at [Portofino] like an eight-year-old boy. It was the first place I really tasted independence and freedom because it’s a sort of little bay with no cars. We would arrive there in the middle of the summer and, of course, I would see my parents – but I was free.’

Now, Savoretti is passing on his love of the coastal town to his three children.

‘It’s amazing when I take my kids and it’s quite bizarre to watch them doing exactly what me and my sister did, and all of my cousins and all my friends. It’s almost like an out-of-body experience, seeing them have the exact same connection and the exact same sense of freedom and independence that they don’t have anywhere else. There’s something connecting us all there.’

Miss Italia is out now; jacksavoretti.com