Italy’s Mellow Mood is making their best music yet and continue to grow

Photo courtesy of Mellow Mood.

Daily Reggae spoke with Mellow Mood’s Lorenzo Garzia to dive into the reggae superstar’s approach to writing new music, Mellow Mood’s excellent new album, “Mañana”, and the balance of creating music and performing live shows.

We are loving your new album, “Mañana”! What were some of the themes that you wanted to get across to fans in this record?

We never picked themes prior. Themes in songs come up naturally. In the case of this album we have a lot of music that express the need and will to give thanks and be grateful.

What is your process for writing lyrics? Do you often start with a riddim, or do the lyrics come first?

The lyrics usually come after the melody, rarely together and almost never before. For most of the songs of this new album, I’d say that we laid down the instrumentals first, collected a bunch of riddims and then picked the ones we liked the most and wrote on them.

Do you write together, or separately?

We write separately most of the time, but we do exchange ideas and help each other.

You have some great features on the record, who was really inspiring to work with?

They all were. Each of them have their own unique style and we tried to suit it by choosing the song we thought they’d fit in better. All of them taught us a musical lesson.

Is reggae huge in Italy? Are there any up-and-comers that fans should know about?

Reggae isn’t huge in Italy and if there are solid up comers we aren’t aware of them unfortunately. Somehow reggae kinda disappeared from the musical scene. We don’t have the platforms we used to have and I guess kids gravitated towards trap and other genres. That doesn’t mean reggae died, it didn’t.

How do you balance playing your new music and older songs when you perform at shows?

Well having newer music every couple of years is great cause you can leave some old songs out of the live set, especially the ones you are bored of or the ones that don’t work as well as others. New music means new energy, it’s very exciting and I believe challenging your musical self with new arrangements and new sounds makes you a better musician.