Max Marinaio Bluesman

A famous blues says ”some people just sing the blues just because they know the song”
yeah blues can be heavy and sarcastic at times, my blues is rather ironic instead
well, I have always written my own blues so... I am not just another blues player
a transient phenomenal guitarist who has to show off;
I am an author, I play what I feel and not just what I like to play"

"Many artists can play the blues but only few can create it"

Max Marinaio

I started inventing blues tunes since my creative beginnings, when I was 19/20 years old.
It was in the summer 1984 when I wrote a song called My Real Life.
That song changed my life because it made me gain awareness of myself as a composer. After that, I realized I could really be a songwriter in life.
Soon after I wrote other blues songs like What He Says, Man Without a Babe, Look Look Look, I Wanna Hear You
that for many years I have played live with my band and that are the cornerstones of my blues repertoire.
These songs at the beginning were only lyrics, vocals and rhythmic guitar. I remember the time when I played them alone in my bedroom with my classic guitar.
They are stuck so deep n my soul and in my life... like a part of me.
Later on, I added the bass parts, the piano parts and the guitar solo licks. All came to me so incredibly natural. These songs will be with me until I die.

Even when I dedicated myself to writing different songs, sooner or later I always returned to the blues, so I can say that blues music has always been a constant in my artistic life. Nor have I ever asked myself what kind of blues to do. Sometimes it was acoustic blues, other times it was a Chicago blues, a Boogie or a New Orleans blues, and at other times it was a rock-blues.
My songs take the form of the inspiration and the mood in which I find myself when the song comes to me.

As a guitarist, in the beginning I considered myself primarily a rhythm guitarist, so the first blues songs had a basic rhythm often mixed with riffs of my own invention like in My Real Life or in Everybody Knows. At other times I used a fingerstyle accompaniment. It was a simple and optimal system since I had to sing and play simultaneously.

Years later I added the piano to some songs that were born on the guitar, Like Man Without a Babe and I Wanna Hear You.
Both Man Without a Babe and What He Says hadn’t any blues solo commentary but a central solo.
In other cases, on these basic guitar rhythms, I imagined that I could possibly put at any time some mostly improvised solo comments. So I didn't write solo parts except for riffs... instead I preferred to write the bass parts because they help define a song.

I started writing the guitar licks only in the 2000s when, having to release my first Album, I started treating the arrangements in a more precise way.
The more I played live, the more I realized how important the solo parts are, in the blues. So my way of conceiving blues has evolved over time but without ever coming to consider a rhythm part superfluous.
Although today I write solos and licks, for me the basis of a song is always a good riff, a good melody and a good rhythm.

As any other thing I do, my Blues songs comes from my personal experiences in life, I tend to avoid clichés and I never talk about life down in Mississippi. So you can say my blues is peculiar but sure is authentic.

Basically I'm not a melancholy person, I often talk about people's strange behavior or their way of thinking with a certain humorous flavor that distinguishes my personality.

I played blues from 2005 to 2011 with my band The Flying Cats, reaching the Pistoia Blues Final already in 2005, I played in the Bolognini Theatre in Pistoia.
We played in many pubs and some square concerts too.

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