Review of Leonid Agutin’s album “Everything is not in vain”

Leonid Agutin’s new disc “Everything is not in vain” has been published on digital platforms. Igor Gavrilov talks about the album in which the singer comes out of his creative stupor and adds oriental exoticism and disturbing Moscow lyrics to the usual Latin American rhythms.

Leonid Agutin begins the story of his sixteenth album, “It’s Not in Vain,” with the song “Marina,” which was written to order: the musician does not hide the fact that such work also occurs in his activities. The children ordered him a song for their mother, whose name is Marina. The arrangement is typical of early Agutin, from the time of “The Barefoot Boy” and “The Voice of the Tall Grass.” The melody of the chorus is also from the charts of the 1990s. However, the applied problem was solved professionally and suddenly became something more than an order. Songs began to appear one after another, and the 12 that were included in the album “Everything is not in vain” are not even all that was born in these nine months.

And before Agutin, in his words, “broke through” in the summer of 2023, no songs were written at all for a year and a half. “I didn’t understand what world I was in, who needed music and creativity in general. They were inappropriate, as it seemed to me,” says the musician. “The audience helped me find the answer.” I didn’t really believe that they could go to concerts in these times. And they began to come, and there were many of them. By this very fact they seemed to be saying: “No, man, we need you. We ourselves will decide what to do in life, and you go ahead, sing, perform, write.”

Here’s “Say Something,” the album’s opening song. “And in the pole there are a hundred devils and silence with a scythe.” “Did you know at night that the morning would come? They heard the thunder, but did not see the fear.” Not the most Agutinian images – rather, they echo Boris Grebenshchikov (included in the Russian Federation in the register of foreign agents) and his “Look me in the eyes and tell me that this is Your will.” Agutin did not make the sadness that permeates the first songs of the album “Say Something” and “It’s Not in Vain” the leitmotif of the album, and this sadness is nostalgic, which, according to the author, “makes you want to live even more.” This love of life is the flesh and blood of Latin American rhythms and colors, to which were added Indian and Middle Eastern ones; they are well felt in the songs “Everything is not in vain” and “The sky falls into your hands.” Working with difficult emotions, Agutin does not go into depression, but, on the contrary, expands his horizons. Thus, the song “The sky falls into your hands” in the finale turns into a Brazilian carnival. And this is despite the fact that the author honestly says: ““The sky is falling into your hands” is a song about the present time, which does not allow you to simply enjoy the summer, forgetting about everything. Summer here looks “somehow not very good.”

The album also includes the song “I am 225 years old,” written for the film adaptation of “Eugene Onegin” by Sarik Andreasyan. In fact, Agutin was initially offered to make a romance. But, says Agutin, “I decided that in the year of Pushkin’s 225th anniversary, I need to say something that he, Pushkin, could tell us. I took upon myself such impudence and came up with this text with the refrain: “You know that everything is simple, but you believe that it is not.” I wanted to say that love still wins, it is we who create difficulties for ourselves.” As a result, instead of a romance, we got a stadium rock anthem with beautiful electric guitars in the spirit of Lenny Kravitz. Pushkin in it seems to be asking his descendants to leave him alone, to stop shifting their responsibility onto him and to live by their own mind.

Large-scale numbers with rich arrangements are diluted with ironic numbers like the song “Ponty”, in which Gosha Kutsenko and Mikhail Polizeymako sing together with Agutin. And in the finale, naturally, a ray of hope shines, namely the song “To Who You Are.” This is an appeal to the same audience of 25–35 years old who returned inspiration to the singer by coming to his concerts. “Young people are characterized by moments of disappointment, depression, and searching,” says Agutin, “everyone goes through this period. But once you overcome it, you will definitely find something. Because disappointments are inherent only to seeking, doubting people.”