Thom Yorke produces Dajana Roncione's first song, “Stepdaughter”

Dajana Roncione, the Palermo-born actor who married Thom Yorke in 2020, has released her first song, “Stepdaughter”, with Yorke as producer and percussionist. Its video, directed by Alex Infascelli, premiered on la Repubblica's website.

The song comes from Michele Placido's Eterno visionario, a film about Pirandello that opens in Italian cinemas today. Roncione plays Vera Vergani, who created the Stepdaughter in Six Characters in Search of an Author at its Rome premiere in 1921, and Placido asked her to find words the Stepdaughter could sing. She wrote them herself, as the character's inner monologue, and took the first lines from the scene in Fritz Lang's Metropolis where Maria dances under the gaze of countless men.

Roncione tells Rolling Stone Italia that she first imagined it unaccompanied, raw and theatrical. The Stepdaughter dances in the play, though, and Placido wanted music to dance to, so she translated the words for Yorke. She had not expected him to produce it; his fascination with Sicily and with Pirandello drew him in. She asked for little bells, percussion and a constant, repetitive rhythm of the kind traditional music uses, and on the record, Exclaim! writes, his percussion builds out of a dark industrial hum. Hand claps came later (at one point, she says, her hands were on fire), and so did a chorus of high voices rising to a scream, which makes the dance play like a rite or an exorcism.

It was definitely one of the freest and most artistic pieces of work I have taken part in so far.

Dajana Roncione²