Interviews – Damiano David Archives

Damiano and Dove are on Vogue Italia’s cover

September 18, 2026September 18, 2026by Emilia

Damiano David and Dove Cameron are set to get married this month in Italy and are also the cover of Vogue Italia’s next issue. Read the interview and check the pictures below:

I meet Dove Cameron and Damiano David on the terrace of the American Academy in Rome, surrounded by umbrella pines and domes stretching across the horizon. Founded in 1894 as a residency for American artists, architects, writers and scholars, the Academy occupies a singular place in Rome, where ancient Roman studies and American intellectual life meet. It feels like the perfect setting for two artists who have built a life across continents.

Since confirming their relationship in 2024 and announcing their engagement earlier this year, Damiano David and Dove Cameron have become one of pop culture’s most closely watched couples. He is the Roman frontman who took Måneskin from busking on Via del Corso to arenas around the world before embarking on a solo career. She is the actress and singer who first rose to fame through Disney before becoming one of today’s most distinctive musical voices. Their careers unfold on enormous stages, but they seem most intent on protecting everything that happens once the spotlight is off.

Photographer Malick Bodian has imagined today’s story almost like a short film. Together with stylist Luca Galasso he has taken the couple on a journey through hidden corners of Rome rather than posing against its monuments. A romantic road movie off the beaten path.

We begin in Monteverde Vecchio, just a few minutes from Bravetta, the neighborhood that shaped Damiano long before stadium tours and Grammy ceremonies. It was here that he first introduced Dove to his Rome and, in many ways, to his life. Over the past few years, Dove has spent months constantly on the move, recording music, filming independent projects and, more recently, becoming the face of Diesel’s first women’s fragrance under Glenn Martens’ creative direction.

But when Damiano first showed her the city, he opted instead for a trip down memory lane through his adolescence.

“Of course there was the classic Trastevere stroll. We went back to the pub where I used to hang out and all the streets where I had my first formative experiences,” Damiano recalls. He mentions Samovar and the legendary Bar San Calisto, where elderly regulars still play cards over Peroni beers while students, artists and musicians fill the piazza outside. His favorite restaurant is a family-run place near St. Peter’s owned by two childhood friends.

Interviews

BILLBOARD: Damiano David Gets Groovy With Tyla & Nile Rodgers On ‘Nostalgic’ New Single ‘Talk To Me’

September 12, 2025September 12, 2025by Emilia

The Måneskin singer’s tour started this week and goes through Europe, Australia, Asia, South America and North America before wrapping in December.

Måneskin lead singer Damiano David taps Tyla and Nile Rodgers for “Talk to Me,” which dropped Friday (Sept. 12).

“Talk to Me” is featured on the deluxe edition of David’s debut album Funny Little Fears, which was originally released May 16 via Sony Music Italy and Arista Records. The deluxe version, titled Funny Little Dreams, includes four more new tracks, including “Cinnamon” with Albert Hammond Jr., “Naked,” “Mysterious Girl” and “Over.”

In a press release, David says he “unexpectedly felt a new wave of inspiration” hit him as the Funny Little Fears World Tour was approaching, which “led me to write ‘Talk to Me.’ What made this spark even more exciting was knowing that the legendary Nile Rodgers thought the song worthy of adding his solo guitar. I always felt this song should be a duet, and since I’ve recently been listening a lot to ‘Water,’ I was completely blown away and really wanted to have [Tyla] sing it with me.”

Tyla adds she “instantly fell in love with how nostalgic it felt. I heard myself on it straight away.” Once Rodgers received the record, he says he “really loved the vibe of it and I wanted my guitar to be the third voice.”

David’s first solo tour started Thursday night (Sept. 11) at the COS Torwar in Warsaw, Poland and will go through the rest of Europe, Australia, Asia, South America and North America before wrapping on Dec. 16 at The Fillmore in Silver Spring, Maryland.

The Italian singer-songwriter earned two nominations at the 2025 MTV Video Music Awards last Sunday (Sept. 7) for best long-form video with “Funny Little Stories” and for MTV push performance of the year with “Next Summer.”

Listen to “Talk to Me” below.

Interviews

GQ: Can Damiano David Bring Back the Sexy Male Rock Star?

July 22, 2025August 15, 2025by Emilia

He became one of the worlds’ biggest musicians after winning Eurovision with Måneskin—and now the Italian singer has his sights on a global solo career. Over espresso and cigarettes in Rome, Damiano David argues that pop music desperately needs a high-fashion frontman.

Damiano David, the frontman of Måneskin, fiddles with the ashtray. Out in the Piazza del Popolo, un minuto a piedi from the hotel courtyard where we sit, a cast of whimsical men has apparently been let loose on the women of Rome. A lollipop salesman is busily seducing a crush of tourists. The maître d’ of a fancy restaurant is entertaining his waitresses by shooing a pigeon with his hat. Not one, but two jesters—first juggling, then dropping, navel oranges—are blowing kisses at the flock of pearly signoras who stopped to lob their fruit back. “Yes,” says David, almost listlessly, “everybody is like a comedian.”

In his own way, David is a performance artist of this particularly Roman strain of rakish male swag. He is the lead singer of a glamorous and extraordinarily horny interpretation of a rock band, whose rise to international megastardom reads like an absurd epic. It began with David, a street musician on the tourist-congested thoroughway of the Via del Corso, and reached one of multiple climaxes when David—shirtless in leather pants, eyeliner, and Louboutin heels—became the winner of the carnivalesque European talent show Eurovision. David’s cock-rocking Måneskin performance made him a muse of former Gucci designer Alessandro Michele and a beloved target of paparazzi, and, in one instance, it earned him a rebuke by the sitting French president (more shortly).

“Romans have this sense of humor,” he says, lighting a cigarette. But the sword, he warns, is double-edged. “It’s definitely a city of judgers,” he says.

David’s talent has been repeatedly positively adjudicated—Måneskin was voted into fame on the road to Eurovision glory—but the 26-year-old has also endured outsize critical heat. Måneskin are commercially powerful practitioners of rock, a genre that is endangered in the US, nearly nonexistent in Italy, and whose remaining advocates seem hell-bent on skewering David on ancient merits like “authenticity.”

Still, since the group’s first album in 2021, Måneskin had hits that banked 11 weeks at the top of the American rock charts. The group got a Grammy nomination for best new artist, made headlines at the MTV Music Awards (largely thanks to David’s thong and chaps), and won at 2022’s American Music Awards for favorite rock song for “Beggin,” a monstrously hooky cover of a track originally sung by Frankie Valli and the Four Seasons in 1967. On the wings of TikTok’s For You Page, “Beggin” soared into the Billboard Top 40, then to number one on its Rock & Alternative Airplay chart. The US press was still declaiming Måneskin’s rock credentials when David made it known that the band was taking a break in order for members to pursue personal music projects.

In Italy, David’s caliber of fame prevents him from going out in public freely. To discuss his first solo album, Funny Little Fears, due to arrive this spring, he is squirreled away in an especially jungly nook of the terrace. His usual deportment—the sweaty, woebegone dark angel driven out of hell to seduce the men and women of earth—is nowhere to be found. David is perfumed, showered, and clothed, posh in dandyish loafers and trousers the color of a hazelnut.

Interviews

FORBES: Damiano David Opens Up On Stunning Solo Debut

July 6, 2025by Emilia

If you only know Damiano David as the lead singer of Italian glam rock band Maneskin, then you don’t know David. On his solo debut, Funny Little Fears, David showcases a whole other side of himself.

Theatrical, vulnerable, eclectic and compelling, Funny Little Fears is an impressive introduction to the singer/songwriter side of David.

I spoke with him in a revealing conversation about being an introvert, why the initial success of Maneskin caught him by surprise, songwriting and much more.

Steve Baltin: Congratulations on the record. I was just looking at your Instagram. I’ve talked about this with so many artists. When you do a solo record as opposed to being in a band, it does feel like because it’s under your name, it’s much more personal. It feels like this one was more internal. Was that the case?

Damiano David: Yeah, I think, especially the last record with my band Maneskin, it’s a lot about what I was seeing externally while this record is a lot about the effects that all that I’ve seen had on me.

Baltin: I’m always a big believer in writing being subconscious. So, when you started doing this and started putting all this into song, were there things that you were surprised about on the record?

David: Yeah, it was actually quite accurate. It’s really my experience. I feel like everything that happened with the band happened so fast that I never really had the chance to absorb it and understand the effects that it was having on me. I was so moved by this boost of energy and enthusiasm that all the problems were going into the back of my brain. But you can delay stuff for only for as long as possible, at one point it’s going to come out. And this was the time for me.

Baltin: Were there specific songs that really surprised you when you went back and listened to the lyrics?

David: I think that pretty much with every song, what happens to me it’s like after I wrote it I read back the lyrics, and I realize that I didn’t even know that I was feeling that so strongly or that like that was the source of my problem. This is really generalized to pretty much every song I write. In general, in the record I was surprised by the level of honesty and vulnerability and disconnects, also with the level of connection that I managed to have with all the producers and songwriters I worked with. It was surprising for me as a very internal person. I don’t share much. So, it was surprising for me the level of understanding and the level of confidence that I can see in the songs.

Baltin: That’s interesting. I’ve talked to so many people about this; music becomes your way of communicating. So, did you have to share this to express your feelings?

David: Yeah, definitely. The word that I was searching for was introverted. But yeah, for me, it’s like opening the lid of a bottle and letting everything come out, because I’m not a great talker. So, music, that’s the trick for me.

Baltin: That’s so interesting to me because Chris Cornell was a friend and Chris was one of the greatest frontmen ever. He told me he was an outcast as a kid and became a musician because music becomes his way of communicating and fitting it with the world.

David: I think especially for songwriters, but I think it applies to musicians in general, many times it starts as a way to be seen or understood. I feel like a very common sentiment is wanting to say something or to show something and maybe not having the platform or not having the confidence or coming from an environment that doesn’t really let you do it. So, music works as this kind of counterattack, where you’re like, “I’ll put myself on a stage. So, you have to listen to me.” Then when you grow older and you’re not that mad and instinctive anymore, you understand that it’s actually your way to communicate strong feelings that can be overwhelming most of the time. When you have the safety of a stage, which seems counterintuitive, but a stage makes me feel makes me and I think a lot of colleagues feel safer. You have the strength to talk about these things.

Baltin: Because you consider yourself an introvert, when Maneskin started to become this huge behemoth that everybody responded to was there a feeling of disconnect, like this didn’t make sense?

David: If you think about it, it feels weird because if you break it down, it’s always weird to think there’s that amount of people giving attention to you. I think it will never get normal for me. But I think that for me it felt a lot like I was right, like, I had something to say, and I thought it was worth listening to. This was finally the evidence that I was right.

Baltin: That then gives you the confidence to do a solo record that is more vulnerable because all these people are responding, all these people love it. The other thing of course that happens is you just get older. And as you get older, you just get more confident, you start to care less about what others think.

David: Yeah, I would say it’s definitely true. I think it happened during the process of the record, I felt like I needed to communicate something and the only way possible to do it was to make a solo project. Then of course after that all the fears and self -doubting and the thinking about what people would think came about but I would say it lasted very few days because I was really paying attention to how writing this music made me feel. It was extremely positive for me.

Baltin: What was the first song written for this record?

David: I started with the purpose of doing a solo project. I knew that a very defining song was “Born With A Broken Heart” because it’s the type of sound that I didn’t imagine for myself at the beginning of the process. Then it ended up being the one I feel more comfortable with right now and most represented by. That was really like a breaking point for me. It was like, “Okay, I think we just found the sound of the record.”

Baltin: What was it about this sound that spoke to you?

David: I felt like it would allow me to be many different things at the same time, which is what I feel like I am and what I want to show the people. I feel like before I’m a songwriter, an artist, a performer or whatever, I’m a person. I’m a human being and people are made of many different layers and many different levels of emotions and experiences. I felt like this type of sound, which is very influenced by theater and musicals, would really give me the chance to explore a huge amount of emotions and dynamics and would allow me to dance if I wanted to dance and be very serious if I wanted to be serious, be very cinematic. I feel like it has such a wide range of emotions, and my main goal is to have fun with music. I felt like this would allow me to really have fun.

Interviews

PARIS MATCH: Damiano David: “With Måneskin, I had to represent the band. Solo, I’m more myself.”

June 28, 2025by Emilia

The singer of the band Måneskin is going solo with a completely different tune. Evolution or revolution?

The era where Damiano David belted out provocations, guitar in hand with his three disciples, drenched in leather, sweat and the scent of stale smoke, is over. The frontman of the alternative rock band Måneskin, founded ten years ago in Rome, has taken flight with his solo album Funny Little Fears. Although he became a household name after his group’s victory at Eurovision in 2021 — pushing France’s Barbara Pravi to second place — Damiano sealed his rock star image with rumors of cocaine and a passionate kiss with his guitarist on a Polish stage.

After three albums and just as many tours, the bold singer announced a solo project last year, marking a “pause” from Måneskin. And as with any solo career, came reinvention. Damiano David appears transformed — in lyrics, in style. Out with the provocative lyrics and ripped outfits; the 26-year-old Roman, once praised by the Rolling Stones and Angelina Jolie, now leans into pop and sugary refrains.

Paris Match: After Måneskin’s explosive rise following your Eurovision win in 2021 — why take the risk of going solo?

Damiano David: I don’t feel like I took a risk. Risks don’t scare me. It was more of a necessity. After playing with the band for many years, I felt the need to express things differently — and I couldn’t do that with them.

How long has the idea of a solo career been in your head?
To be honest, I always considered it. I was just waiting for the right time, I wanted to feel ready. When that moment came, I jumped in.

You’ve swapped wild hard rock for romantic pop. How do those two worlds coexist within you?
I’m a mix of both. One part of me is very confident, very self-assured — that’s the version that went on stage with Måneskin. But growing up, I’ve become a more complex, more whole human being. That second side, the more mature one, is just as real.

Yet you said pop lets you be more yourself. Was that not the case with rock?
The biggest difference is that with Måneskin, as the songwriter, I always tried to represent each band member in the lyrics. Sure, the words were mine, but the whole group had to see themselves in the songs. Now that I’m alone, I write about my own experiences, my own feelings. No one can influence the songwriting. I’m more myself.

You worked with many people on this album, including Jason Evigan (Maroon 5, Demi Lovato, Selena Gomez…). Did that reassure you?
Honestly, I didn’t focus much on their credentials. What mattered most to me was the atmosphere — I need to feel good when creating music. Jason is incredibly talented and kind. He didn’t take the easy route of replicating Måneskin’s sound. Instead, he tried to understand who I am as a solo artist — that’s why we worked so well together.

You’re often compared to Harry Styles, in both style and career path. How do you feel about that?
He’s talented! So… why not? I guess it’s normal for people to draw comparisons. But if you really listen to our music, it’s quite different.

How did your collaboration with Suki Waterhouse on “The Bruise” come about?
I sent her the song directly. I’d written it as a duet and needed a voice that was beautiful, soft, ethereal. Suki has all of that. Her music feels close to the world I created around this track. I was thrilled when she said she loved it and wanted to join.

What did you feel the first time you were in the studio alone — without the other three members?
At first, it was really hard. I had to open up to new people, share deeply personal things. That was by far the toughest part. Once I got through it, we immediately started composing. Quickly, the rhythms, sounds, and arrangements started sounding right. That’s when I knew I’d made the right choices.

You’ve often been called the “bad boy of rock” with your punk looks and wild vibe. Is this album proof that your rebellious phase is over?
(He laughs) I hope so! This album reflects what I’m going through in life. But who knows? Maybe I’ll go through another rebellious phase!