Robert Durante

It always starts with a guitar (my bio)

Writing a BIO is not an easy task and I could have been brief, with just the chronology of my (short) artistic experience, but I wished to reserve bulleted lists just for my graduated alter ego, who’s not less important.

Sometimes I’m feeling to live two different lives, being also an engineer and maybe this fact slowed down my creativity (or maybe just helped to rationalize it). Nevertheless, my life was (and is) made of other amazing things, like family, work, friends, travels, moving to different cities and continents. Artistically, I can say it was a B movie with good prospective, in comparison to the others that made it to the top as I still hanging there in the woods. 

The chronology can start in Italy with some early experience in writing poems at school but my relation with the music started instead with listening to the hits from the 60s, mainly the Beatles, Kinks and the Rolling Stones at home thanks to my father’s vinyl collection, but also some rock’n’roll  (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Buddy Holly or Elvis) or R&B (Ray Charles). I remember watching Yellow Submarine and being fascinated by the songs in the movie (Hey Bulldog is one of the best rock song of the Beatles). I started playing the guitar around 12 y.o., with my brother (and now he plays the bass/electric guitar and features in my records as well). The first tune I played was “Happy Birthday”, learnt from a small teaching book. Initially I played 3 fingers chords only (C G D E etc.) and then I ventured bravely into the more difficult ones i.e. the F, B, etc. I guess the first song I learnt was “Girl” from the Beatles. Furthermore, I don’t have to forget the influence from some Italian bands and singers I was listening to in my early years like Nomadi, Fabrizio De Andre’ or Lucio Battisti. I don’t have much relation with the music of this period instead.  
As soon I started playing guitar I also created my first compositions, usually dedicated to the girl of the period (so performed with a sad tune and minor chords). At 18 years old I had already composed several songs, mostly in Italian but also in English and I still have all the lyrics in a carton box that is following me since then in all my relocations. All the lyrics (and chords) are there except for the song that I actually recorded in a real studio, performed in a video and sang live in front of a public (title “Tu sei qui, You Are Here). It was, I guess, 1988. I paid 100,000 Italian lire (about AU$275 of today) to have it professionally produced and recorded in just a few hours, then I went to a private TV studio to record the video as well (I remember I was wearing a white sweater and they transmitted it a few times on TV). Unfortunately, for some reasons I lost the cassette where it was recorded (due sides one with vocals and the other one only with the backing track). Before this, I also recorded some of my compositions during a jam session with my brother Antonello and a couple of friends organized to create a cassette to impress a girl. Well, I was doing amazing things at that age, really… I still have that record from 1987, I can’t believe it was 34 years ago! Finally, in 1988 I won a poem contest at school (The Ludus Ostiensis). After that, I attended engineering at university and froze my musical creativity for many years (with the exception of a brief cameo in a soul band) at least until I graduated. There were a lot of ups and downs in that period and I didn’t compose anything relevant until 1996 with a couple of ballads and then, in 1999 I came up with (maybe) my best Italian song, Luca Tempesta. It was there, playing in my mind for months, waiting to be written on paper and sang out loud. There are a few version of this song in my YouTube channel but I also released a single last year. So until I married Marina (also the author of the photos in my website) in 2002, I composed a few other tunes and recorded in a studio session, I guess it was in 2003. Then nothing for more than 15 years until 2019 because I’ve just been busy (family, work, life, travels). In the meantime we moved to Australia in 2010 and settled in in this beautiful Country. I’m pretty sure the change came with my new guitar (a Maton) that was a gift from my wife because the chaos was pushing to get out of my mind (or my soul). Or maybe because of the beautiful scenarios, the long walks with my dog, the clear and boundless blue sky or the sense of freedom that this place instilled in me (it inspired one of my last songs, Feeling Free). I only know that this chaos prompted the creation of a couple of dozens of songs since Oct 2019. I also decided to produce and record them in my home studio. After all of that, I released in June 2020 my first official single, Jupiter Stars, following further 6 singles and an album (Feeling Free!). I also joined a few songwriters associations (for example ASA) meeting awesome people, played my tunes on a stage before a public and this was unthinkable just a few years ago.  
Now that I’m finally following that path that I lost long time ago, I'm just about to publish my second album, Ain't Out of the Woods that will be released on June 7th.