I started writing songs when I was 16, when my parents gave me my first guitar; it was a cheap classical guitar, with strings that felt like barbed wire and a sound that reminded you of those early polyphonic ringtones. I learned about three chords and started jotting down lyrics in English, even though I was terrible at it, but I didn't want to write in Italian, it sounded so cheesy and “pop”. I think I wrote about a thousand songs but most of them were garbage, grammatically awful or non-sense. I've always collected them, though, knowing that maybe, one day, I would be able to come back and “polish them up”, give them a meaning. And I did that, in this book – although some of them still remain terrible.