Damiano David about music beyond Måneskin and his debut solo album 'Funny Little Fears' • Interview • DIY Magazine

There are many ways to describe Damiano David, the swaggering frontman of Italian rock band Måneskin, and now an equally self-assured solo star, but we’ll start with the way he describes himself: “I’m a very dramatic person.” The Rome-born musician, who speaks floridly with a refreshing lack of false modesty, has a life-altering story to prove it. Midway through Måneskin’s last world tour – ostensibly in support of their 2023 album ‘Rush!’, but essentially an extension of the global promo treadmill they’d been on since winning Eurovision two years earlier – Damiano realised that “something needed to change”.

Damiano, who formed Måneskin when he was 17 with fellow Roman teenagers Victoria De Angelis and Thomas Raggi – plus Ethan Torchio, who hailed from nearby Frosinone – was having a full-on crisis of purpose. “I was feeling kind of numb, but I wasn’t realising it,” he recalls. “I got to a very, very low point where, you know, I started thinking: ‘Is it even worth it to do all this – to endure this much anxiety and this much stress? Am I happy? Am I doing the right thing? Is this what I wanted when I was kid?’”

Måneskin had completely exploded since winning Eurovision in 2021 with their stylish rock stomper ‘Zitti e buoni’. In the months following, their vaguely subversive original ‘I Wanna Be Your Slave’ and typically rambunctious cover of The Four Seasons’ ‘Beggin’’ also became global megahits. The quartet levelled up so spectacularly that ‘Rush!, their first internationally released album, featured songs co-written with A-list hitmakers like Max Martin (Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift) and Lostboy (Kylie Minogue, Calvin Harris). But Damiano, who’s still only 26 now, had no chance to take stock. “I really started a process of questioning the things I built and the people I surrounded myself with and the goals I was chasing,” he says. “And the picture it painted was really not the picture I wanted.”

Here’s where the story gets really dramatic. Instead of pondering how to reshape his priorities, Damiano made a snap decision: “Fuck everything. I’m going to the US [after the tour] to start from scratch.” He says his first two weeks living in LA were “terrifying” because he knew “like two people”, but he turned a corner on his 16th day. “There were constant signals from the sky, the earth, the people around me – like, ‘keep pushing, you’re doing the right thing’,” he recalls. “And today, the result of that is I have an album I truly love with music I never thought I was gonna make. I moved into a beautiful apartment with the person I love, and I have my community here. I have endless evidence that this was the right thing to do.”

In fairness, LA does seem to agree with Damiano. It’s 9.30am there when we begin our Zoom interview – pretty early for a rock star – but he’s just happy to be settling into his new apartment. “There’s a lot going on but, but we’re killing it with the boxes,” he says with a smile, alluding to the fact that unpacking isn’t a one-person job: he’s making a home with his girlfriend, the singer and actress Dove Cameron. Damiano’s debut solo album ‘Funny Little Fears’, a resplendent collection of anthemic pop-rock that’s generally less riff-driven than Måneskin, also has some dramatic moments. On the Killers-esque single ‘Born with a Broken Heart’, which has already racked up 100 million Spotify streams, Damiano sings: “Baby, you can’t fix me – I was born with a broken heart.”

Damiano calls it a “declaration of intent” written at a low ebb. “If I read the lyrics [now], I can see how I was torn between two major feelings,” he explains. “There was a part of me that was extremely protective towards myself and closed off to new people and experiences. I was in this kind of energy-saving mode because I was coming from a very intense period. But then there’s the other part of me that wants to be happy and loved.” Damiano says the song encapsulates an internal “battle between the old me and the new me”.

So, presuming the new Damiano won, how is he different? “The main difference is how much I accept my fallibility. I think that every human, even the coolest ones, have failures and make mistakes,” he replies. “This new version of myself accepts the un-perfect parts – I don’t try to hide it anymore. I’m more outspoken, more honest, and there’s way less layers and boundaries [around me]. It’s like everything is more clear.”

“I really started a process of questioning the things I built, and the people I surrounded myself with, and the goals I was chasing.”

Elsewhere, ‘Funny Little Fears’ can be unabashedly romantic: on the lovely, chugging ‘Zombie Lady’, Damiano compares himself and his paramour to the otherworldly lovebirds from the Tim Burton film Corpse Bride. The wistful midtempo ‘Next Summer’ takes a rather fatalistic view of a failed relationship: “You had to throw away our love / To find out nothing’s as good as us.” But in places, it’s far more vulnerable than fans might expect from a peacocking rock frontman who’s frequently hailed as a style icon (he’s starred in campaigns for Bvlgari and Diesel). Damiano begins the album singing about voices that are “gonna find me wherever I go” and ends it with a cryptic lament called ‘Solitude (No One Understands Me)’. “I think the lyrics to that song need to be read two or three times to be completely understandable,” Damiano says earnestly.

At this juncture in his career, what does Damiano think are the biggest misconceptions about him? “I think – and this is 50% my responsibility, 50% the audience’s – that I’ve shown only the extremely confident and always pushing [forward] part of myself,” he says. “And so I feel like there’s been a lack of… not even curiosity, because I don’t think I am necessarily worth curiosity, but a lack of comprehension that a human is made of many different layers.” Perhaps wary of sounding too self-possessed, he peppers his point with a joke. “I hope people don’t think I go to Target butt-naked to buy bread,” he says with a broad smile. “There’s got to be a normal guy part [of myself] and for me, it’s the normal guy part that really grew in the last few years. Because I started taking care of it.”

Damiano grew up in a “normal family” who “weren’t the richest”, but still gave him an early advantage in life. Because both his parents were flight attendants, he had the opportunity to travel more widely than his peers. “Since I was very, very young, I’ve always been surrounded by people of other ethnicities, sexualities and religious beliefs,” he says. “As a five-year-old, you just absorb everything. So then later, when I was starting to have a critical mind at 14 or 15, everything was already normal for me. I didn’t have to go through the [usual] process of the white boy that has to deconstruct [his] beliefs and the idea of masculinity and white privilege.”

Damiano also notes, with that appealing lack of false modesty, that he was “lucky enough not to suck at anything” as a kid. He excelled at football and basketball, which instilled an early belief that “if I really put myself into [something], I’m gonna somehow succeed at it”. This sense of “endless possibilities”, as Damiano terms it, would become a key driver of Måneskin’s success. “When I started pursuing music, I remember saying to my bandmates, like, ‘If Justin Bieber and those guys made it, why shouldn’t we?’” he says. He wasn’t claiming that Måneskin were already on Bieber’s level – just that they had potential. “What do we have stopping us except for our own sense of shame and our own sense of failure?” he says. “I’ve always thought that if I want to do it, I have the chance to do it. And I was right.”

Damiano applied this can-do attitude to the band’s first real test – a “lo-fi” emerging bands competition in Rome that they dominated – then to their second: the 2017 season of the Italian X Factor, in which they finished as runners-up. He even felt confident four years later when Måneskin entered the Eurovision Song Contest, a famously unpredictable musical smorgasbord that Italy had only won twice in the past. “I think we really made sense [for the contest] because Eurovision has this very parade[-like] attitude where there’s a lot of colour, dance and noise,” he says. “I felt like, in that moment, we were the right conjunction between the Eurovision attitude and the [wider] music industry, because we were glam, colourful, loud, sexy and cunty. But at the same time, we were giving a real performance.”

Still, Damiano admits he had no idea that Eurovision would “change his life forever”. He and his bandmates thought it might lead to more gigs around Europe, but it actually made them “one of the very few Italian acts to have mainstream global success”. He says he’s “extremely proud of how we managed everything”, but regrets not taking a break until his “fuck everything!” moment on their last tour. Making ‘Funny Little Fears’ was an act of healing, partly because it reignited his sense of purpose, but also because he learned a lot about himself through his songs. “Now my real life is happy enough that I can afford shit to happen in my professional life,” he says sanguinely. “The difference now is I have something to go back home to and hold on to.”

‘Funny Little Fears’ is out 16th May via Sony Music Italy / Arista.

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