Ancora qui

About the song

«Ancora qui» is the meeting of two very different Italian careers: the music is by Ennio Morricone, the composer of the great spaghetti westerns, and the words and the voice belong to Elisa, the singer-songwriter from Monfalcone who had started out writing in English and won the Sanremo Festival in 2001. It was written for Quentin Tarantino’s western «Django Unchained» and appeared on the film’s soundtrack album, released on 18 December 2012 by Republic Records and Loma Vista. On 4 January 2013 it was issued on its own as a digital single through Sugar Music, Elisa’s label. The track runs for just over five minutes and is credited as produced by Elisa and Morricone together.

The collaboration began through the record company. Sugar Music put the two in touch, and Morricone invited Elisa to his home, where he played her a set of melodies he had composed with her in mind. He gave her one piece of advice for the lyrics: to write from her own memories rather than invent a story. Elisa chose to write about a childhood friend who had died of leukaemia, and the song became a quiet conversation with someone who is no longer there but who still seems close. The melody also contains a nod to Beethoven’s «Für Elise», a small musical echo of the singer’s name.

The song speaks to a person who has gone, and it moves between the certainty of who that person was and the hope of being forgiven. In the middle section the singer looks at an open landscape — grass, warm air, flowers, a rising wind, a sky with clouds drifting through the blue — and in all of it she seems to recognise the one she has lost. There is no drama in the words: they accept that the past cannot be changed, and they end with a string of promises in the future tense, repeated again and again, about returning and remembering.

Morricone first sent Tarantino a simple demo built on the piano. The director liked it so much that he used that version in the film, without telling the composer in advance where it would appear. A fuller arrangement was recorded afterwards, but it did not make it onto the soundtrack. That fuller version found a home on Elisa’s next studio album, «L’anima vola», released on 15 October 2013, where it sits as the ninth track. It was her first studio album written entirely in Italian.

Musically it is a slow ballad built around classical guitar and piano, with a restrained vocal that never pushes for effect. Reviewing the soundtrack, critics at Pitchfork and The Daily Telegraph singled it out as one of the album’s most moving moments, praising the controlled melancholy of Elisa’s singing and the dark, gently rolling mood of Morricone’s writing.