Italy's Santa Chiara Announces Garage-Pop Album

Santa Chiara is IMPORTED, and her album is, too. Today we announce her full length debut album Imported, out October 20th via Kill Rock Stars. Having teased the album with her first single, “Peach Tree,” we’ve just released her second single “Visa.” In “Visa,” she channels her frustrations about the legal process into a punk and surf rock fever dream, screaming hot on the mic as her feelings boil over in song.

Chiara explains to Flood Magazine: “There’s quite a few ways to get into the US and none of them include kindness and understanding. My immigration process started five years ago applying for a K1 Visa. Incriminating and discriminatory, stressful and tiring until the end. Even when you obtain the stamp to be enough it might not be enough and every 10 years you’ll have to prove yourself good again. The song is about this.”

 Raised in the classical conservatories of Italy, where she was considered a child prodigy on the cello and toured with orchestras throughout Europe, moving to the United States was not a part of Chiara D’Anzieri’s life plan.

At 3, she began playing musical instruments; at 13, she joined her first orchestra; at 16, she founded her first string quartet; and at 20, she left the conservatory to pursue her own interests outside the classical world.

She taught herself guitar, bass, and drums, and studied the music of Frank Zappa and Captain Beefheart, Velvet Underground, The Doors, and The Beatles. She nicknamed herself “Santa Chiara,” after her favorite monastery in Naples, to give her music a divine connection. As a female singer/songwriter, she faced backlash and misogyny, so she learned how to record and produce her own music.

And at 24, just as she was on the verge of giving up her dreams, she met someone who would forever change her life’s trajectory: Her now-husband, American singer/songwriter Ron Gallo.

Santa Chiara’s IMPORTED, out October 20, 2023 via legendary indie label Kill Rock Stars, tells the story of their transatlantic romance and everything that followed: Leaving her home country and immigrating to the United States at 25, building a first home together in Nashville, and ultimately leaving that home for a new one in Philadelphia, where the couple now resides.

“Being an immigrant at the age of 25 was a new territory – my life was changing drastically,” D’Anzieri says. “I was moving to the other side of the planet, to a country I was never interested in, speaking a different language from my own, and leaving everything behind me out of love. It was and still is a big deal.”

“This album is a collection of moments, pictures, feelings, sadness, nostalgia, thoughts, hopes, and love. I wanted to make a record that sounded just like me. I wanted to play instruments how I like, put them together how I think they go together. Making music that sounds how I would look. I wanted this record to be so easy and clear. I wanted it to be immediate. It’s called IMPORTED because it is actually imported; it comes with me, talks about my stories and my history. Being Italian and European comes out in little things, even just in the way I use words.”

Self-produced and largely self-performed by D’Anzieri (with guest performances by Ron Gallo, Dominic Billett, Jerry Bernhardt, and Eric Slick), IMPORTED is a labor of love born out of life’s euphoric highs and turbulent lows.

“One of my feet is always in some saudade and melancholia that you can’t really describe… I never had anxiety (before moving to the States),” she shares. “I was in a bubble, and then I came here, and that’s how these new feelings got together with my past and what I was before. They all create this collection, this salad that is my record.”

Album opener “25” is the first song D’Anzieri wrote in English, and talks about her first time in the U.S. as an immigrant. “A quarter century old, now an immigrant made to feel like a criminal,” she sings over effected electric guitars and churning drums, bringing to life a smorgasbord of emotions in a psychedelia-soaked haze. “And now it's time to drink all the Atlantic Ocean and be together forever, who knows how long forever will be.”

“Worth It or Not?” charts her first existential crisis through pulsing drums and emotionally charged vocals. “I was asking myself if any of what I do is worth it or not,” D’Anzieri admits. “I was wondering if anyone ever sees how much people try and do their best. I was just growing, I guess.”

For as much pain and heartache is embedded within IMPORTED – and rightfully so – Santa Chiara’s music is also full of light and love. The album’s sun-kissed lead single “Peach Tree,” D’Anzieri’s favorite song on the record, captures nostalgia for the life she first discovered in her “American hometown” of Nashville, Tennessee.

“I wrote the music part in Nashville during a nice sunny day while looking at what we thought was a dead peach tree in our backyard, blooming and thriving,” Chiara recalls. “Ron and I tried to save that tree as soon as we moved into our first house. We lived a simpler life, making music, taking care of that tree, and walking around the east side of Nashville. Making a bonfire with our best friends, staring at the stars and the fireflies during a summer evening. I was stuck in the U.S. due to my immigration process, and while that was a pain, some of these sweet, simple experiences were a balm soothing my soul.”

While IMPORTED is very much a product of D’Anzieri’s own personal experiences, its emotions are universal. Her songs of love and leaving home, of coming to a new place and planting new roots, of feeling like a stranger in a strange land, transcend the moment: And as she navigates the hurdles before her, her songs echo timeless questions about purpose and place; of human existence and the meaning of life itself.

“I just want this record to bring emotions to whoever is listening to it,” she says. “I want people to feel things, especially now that the world push everyone to do the opposite.”

From Turin, Italy to Nashville, and finally Philadelphia, Santa Chiara is IMPORTED.

Photo credit: Zoe Salvucci

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