Chiara Bertelli is back to R&B, soul and jazz. Her new single, La fiera del niente, is out now. For years she worked under the name Elly. Now she starts over from her own name, the one on her birth certificate. It feels like a way home: a return to her most honest voice, with other people's expectations left outside.
She wrote and composed the track herself. It's elegant and gut-level, and it blends contemporary R&B, cinematic soul, jazz and songwriter pop into something suspended and nocturnal. The production lets every shade of her voice come through, wrapped in a warm, velvety sound.
The song grows out of a real fragility: the feeling of being out of place in a world that rewards speed and surface and leaves little room for depth or empathy. Inside that fragility there is also a rebirth. La fiera del niente becomes a search for inner peace, an invitation to know yourself better and turn sensitivity into strength. It talks about healing and listening, with a more spiritual, intuitive side to it.
With this chapter, Chiara Bertelli sets a clear direction: contemporary R&B, soul and jazz built on honesty, elegance and feeling. Its roots are in the black tradition, and it sits close to artists like Jazmine Sullivan, Sophie Faith, Sasha Keable, Yebba, Leon Thomas, Giveon and PJ Morton.
The interview with Chiara Bertelli for the release of La fiera del niente
How did La fiera del niente come about?
The seed of the song is years old. I'd been thinking for a long time about writing again and talking about myself in a completely honest way, but something always stopped me before I even started.
Around this time last year, after a lot of work on myself and in the middle of a bad personal stretch, I felt alone and disoriented. It wasn't the first time, but it felt like starting from zero again.
After a complicated summer that backed me into a corner, I understood it was time to begin again, from myself. It was the only thing I still felt I hadn't lost.
I picked up several songs I'd written and left to gather mould in folders on my computer. I listened again to La fiera del niente, and it seemed the right one to restart from.
The title has been with the melody since the beginning. It comes from a short, socially minded text my mum wrote in her spare time, and it inspired me a lot.
Listening back, I realised the words came from a gaze that had changed over time. They needed a more current dress. I rewrote almost the whole lyric, wrote the bridge, which didn't exist yet, and added new vocal parts. Then, with the producer, we reworked the harmonies and built the best outfit the song could have right now, for my taste, my style and my way of feeling.
What's left of Elly in your new identity?
Everything is left. The experience, the joy of a teenager who wants to live off music, the wounds, the good memories, but also the sadness and the frustration.
Elly is a part of me I can't and shouldn't erase, even though I've often wanted to. She belongs to my story and to everything I carry from 12 years in music, and in life above all.
Chiara is me, without filters. She has the name my mum and dad gave me, the one everyone has always used. When I hear it called out loud in a square, even though it's one of the most common, I turn around.
Chiara is Elly's soul.
No character, no construction, no lies.
Chiara is the 3-year-old singing Christina Aguilera, Michael Bublé and Mariah Carey in the car with her mum. The 11-year-old who begged to study singing and get on stage. The teenager who would have done anything to feel seen, loved, at the centre of attention. The nineteen-year-old who leaves her small town for the city and the Conservatory, and feels she has to start from zero, as if she'd never seen the world before.
Chiara is the jazz singer, the songwriter, the vocalist, the singing teacher, the result of a life given to music. But all of that is far too small. Chiara is much more, and I hope to tell you so in my songs. Chiara is me, from the depth of my essence.
What made you want to start again under your own name?
I'd been thinking about it for a while, four or five years at least. Last year I understood that the main block keeping me from writing again was my identity. For years I'd carried a name given to me at the start of my first records, and the more I grew, learned, experimented and lived, the less it felt mine.
My musical path is long for someone who's 28. On record it starts in 2014, and long before that in training and experimenting. It hasn't always been easy. A few years ago I had to face my truth. Situations and people I thought would be good for me, would lift me up, had been draining my lifeblood for too long.
The choice wasn't easy, for many reasons, from the most intimate to the bureaucratic, technical and brand-related ones. But it was necessary. A full stop on the past and a capital letter to begin a new chapter about me, one I hope will bring a lot of light.
How do you survive everyday life without being swept away by superficiality and speed? How do you manage?
Well, I don't always manage, and that's exactly where the song comes from. Feeling, noticing and taking in so much doesn't always help, especially in a world this fast, where everything is consumed quickly and nothing seems to stop or stay.
La fiera del niente is a metaphor for all those things, relationships and situations that don't have or give value. They just appear, with no substance behind them.
In Brescia dialect they say “nient de sena”. It literally means “nothing for dinner”, close to “all smoke and no roast”.
I tried to give back, through my gaze, which isn't only analytical but also gut-level and at times spiritual, the feeling of inadequacy when you watch superficiality, hurry and compulsive consumption, and feel out of place for wanting something true and simple. The discomfort of touching our own emotions because the outer container is too small to hold them.
Bringing this big idea back to my own feelings and music, I pictured the parts of the song as light against shadow, which we all carry inside. The verse is the shadow: my more “earthly” side, unresolved and fragile, angry and confused, still asking questions without finding answers.
The choruses are my more “spiritual” side, light and hope. The lucid part that remembers that everything I've lived and am living is leading me toward an important evolution. The part that isn't afraid to “look at itself inside old fears” (quote from the lyrics). They aren't only my fears but the ones we all have, and we probably carry them from generations back.
This duality lives in all of us, and finding the balance remains the marvellous mystery of life.
R&B, jazz and soul have historically struggled in Italy, but in recent years several artists are taking this road again. Do you think something has changed?
I think that, especially in recent years and among the new generations, just like with our social condition, we're heading toward a big split.
On one side there's music made with AI: fake voices, samples, stereotyped genres that are easy to catch, lyrics with no meaning. Very catchy, and incredibly useful for marketing, for an ever more centrifugal mass distribution.
On the other side there's a return to projects with real instruments only, research and crossing of genres, a wish for a modern language that still carries the experience and beauty of the past. Music that made the soul vibrate and the heart dance, words that knew how to reassure minds.
I strongly believe genres considered “niche”, like R&B/soul, jazz and many others, are being listened to again, even by audiences less musically trained, with the drive of someone lost in the desert: drinking again, eating again.
I think the further we go, the more we'll need to go back and touch truth with our hands, things that taste genuine and resonate with our oldest part.
Your biggest inspirations in music?
Since I was little I've been fascinated by the great voices of Black Music, from old-school soul to more modern, contaminated pop/R&B.
My jazz training at the Conservatory opened, without a doubt and for good, the door to a one-way trip toward Black Music. Everything colourful, warm, agile and carrying deep messages belongs to me.
Jazz always gives me elegance and refinement, but also all the raw, gut emotions of the people who laid its foundations. Improvisation and attention to harmony are what I hope to keep in my original music, always.
Soul and pop-R&B attract me for the groove, the warm colour and the strong interpretive pathos. And, as a good Italian, there's no lack of love for words, for writing that always draws on the great pens of our songwriting tradition.
Your favourite songs? Or rather, the songs best suited to get to know Chiara.
If I named my favourite songs, or the ones that over the years had something to do with me and the genres I've listened to and loved most, I'd fill at least ten pages. Since I can't, I'll limit myself to six tracks that were on constant rotation in my playlist last year and that went with me on the journey to the name change and the restart with my own original music.
- Look Me, I Can Fly – Annie Tracey
- Yes It Is – Leon Thomas
- Move it along – Sasha Keable
- Traces – Tyler Lewis
- Folded – Kehlani
- Twenties – Giveon