The Cockroach Diary is a journey into the mind of classical guitarist, Nicoletta Todesco, grappling with loneliness, creativity, and ambition in a hollow New York City. This new song cycle was produced by the Italian-born Todesco herself alongside mixing and mastering engineer Jennifer Nulsen.

The Cockroach Diary is the debut full-length recording of guitarist, singer and songwriter, Nicoletta Todesco, engineered by Grammy-nominated Jennifer Nulsen in Brooklyn.

So here we have a “debut” album by a highly-trained, lifelong, impassioned artist. It’s hard to believe. I always find this way of talking about music releases a little misleading because journalists may have an inherent bias when using a term like “debut.” They may use this word as a self-serving way to take partial credit for breaking out an artist, or to build the context that the artist is green and raw if it informs and serves their narrative, or one may use that word to denote the faults of a particular recording when they don’t like how it sounds.

All of this is moot. Todesco is no less accomplished than any artist out there looking to build on the early stages of their career or project. She is in fact, vastly over-accomplished in some respects. And if one starts going looking for demerits or faults in this album, they may find themselves and their efforts fruitless.

For all intents and purposes, there’s no reason other than mere fact, to note that this is her debut recording — it may as well be her fourth album. And it certainly sounds like that — this is top-shelf talent, execution, creativity, and boldness on display.

Todesco has performed around the world both solo and in various chamber ensembles, she won first prize at the Austin Classical Guitar Composition Competition in 2022, she has taught music for over 15 years and received the Eliot Fisk Prize at the Yale School of Music, and she’s a founding member of the contemporary music ensemble, Zer0Crediti. I think it’s fair to say that there’s nothing green, or raw, about this artist’s vision or voice.

And that shows…

With an incredibly deft hand, a wide vocal range, and an aptitude for slinkying between the boundaries of genre, this album combines classical guitar with poetry and song in an elevated amalgamation of styles to tell the stories and personal challenges accompanying Todesco’s life in New York City, and the discoveries of self that resulted. It’s often glammed up with jazz, and dusted up with folk sensibilities, but the experience is something approaching both the best thing you’d see all night at a Greenwich Village open mic and the weirdest thing you’d see in a philharmonic concert hall.

And although the studio can sometimes lie about an artist’s talent, where you might listen back and think “there’s no way she played this insanely complicated music while singing these lyrics at the same time,” videos posted to Todesco’s YouTube page would prove otherwise.

There’s no trickery here. The songs really just are that good, and are performed to near perfection. And yet, the ambivalence of her quirkiness and her indubitable mirth make even that point moot, too.

Listen to “LU-NA” here:

The fidelity on this recording is out of this world. There’s something in the metaphor of the cockroach — the subject matter of which is vessel for exploring the good, the bad, and the ugly regarding the artist’s emigration to and life in New York City — that requires intimate stories be told with intimate audition.

However, it symbolizes many things.

Todesco uses observations about a cockroach in her introduction piece, the first, semi-improvised, track on the record, how it wiggles its antennae and crawls across the floor toward the shadows, as if to suggest her position as the observer. Not necessarily the main protagonist of this story. Perhaps this is also to paint a portrait of a lonely girl in a wild environment, looking for inspiration, making friends with the unknown.

A cockroach here is a muse, a dancer, a character whose journey tells a story, and a friend. But they can also represent resilience. They can represent survival, grit, indestructibility.

They can represent repulsiveness. A creature perfectly content to live in putrid squalor, heaps of trash, rotting misery. Their presence a mirror reflecting our own filthiness.

They can also represent change, and our very human capacity to engage in it, as in Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. The story of a being transformed without agency, trying to make sense of a world where the limits of our ability to activate consequence and control are shallower than we realize. Kafka’s cockroach is also used as a tool for extracting perspective on the truth behind one’s most immediate relationships.

But the cockroach is also, more simply, a tiny animal with intricate, erratic behaviours examined only by patient, careful attention. This audio recording, as close-mic’d and clearly mixed as possible, offers us, not Todesco, the opportunity to be the observer of a host of sonic delights. The guitar’s hard shell, the tiny, tactile frictions along nylon strings; the artist’s wind-sculpted voice vacillating between whispering, speaking, and singing; all audible and perceptible to us.

In a way, Todesco sees all of these. These representations, narratives, true and false pathways embellishing her autobiography in song cycle.

And hers cover quite a bit of thematic material from lyrical and stylistic standpoints, venturing into myriad dramatic locales. Although this isn’t necessarily set up like a concept album. There is no overarching story that the listener is asked to occupy throughout in order to follow a storyline, other than this being a highly personal, reflexive and reflective “diary” of musings that say more about the artist as human than the artist as world-builder.

Some tell stories of searching, of loneliness, of existential questioning, of vivid imaginary adventure. A mind that wanders this much would most definitely find itself preoccupied by the wandering maneuvers of a cockroach.

Musically, it almost sounds like Todesco is accentuating and accenting her performance on this recording with “bug-like” action and materiality. When not strumming chords or walking fingered arpeggiations along the fretboard, the anticipatory vamping is done in a way that makes it sound like insects crawling along a hardwood floor.

It’s icky at times, and a powerful example of what makes this relatively simple-sounding record (“girl with guitar”) so much deeper and engaging the more time one spends with it.

What’s more, I think Todesco is also acutely aware of the unique symbiosis between her voice and her guitar’s voice. As much as this territory does feel familiarly trodden by a Suzanne Vega or Joan Baez or Vashti Bunyan type bardesse, the difference to me is that here, the guitar and voice are two completely independent insects, buzzing around each other, sniffing each other, releasing cocktails of pheromones, coming in closer together and then orbiting farther apart.

It’s a dance. She knows it. The joy she brings to this music shows it.

So it got me thinking: What would an insect’s diary of songs about us humans sound like?

What would their observations of us, while going about their lives, seeking out food, seeking out opportunities to procreate, escaping treacherous predators, reveal about their own nature? What would interest them?

Would we be a metaphor for the stories they tell about themselves? Would our rituals and habits become their symbolism and allegory? Would our ugliness and cruelty serve to remind them of their civility and loyalty?

These sorts of questions seem to propel Todesco’s mind as well. It’s almost as if she finds herself wondering that if her own behaviours and choices are this erratic and instinctual, and hard to decipher, are we that different from the insects crawling across our floors?

Perhaps we understand their trajectories more in some cases than our own?

Please check out Nicoletta Todesco’s virtuosic work, both live and on record, via her website here, and buy The Cockroach Diary via the link below.

Listen and purchase here, please.