It takes a confident and centred person to pull away from fast-climbing global success and do something that makes them happy, no matter the outcome. Italian singer Damiano David did just that when he took a break from Måneskin—the glam rock band he started when he was 17—which won the 2021 Eurovision Song Contest with their stomping rocker “Zitti e buoni,” and led to the release of their first international album and world tours.
As he told the crowd at Coca-Cola Coliseum last night (Dec. 2) in Toronto — an ambitious venue choice with a capacity of 9,000 that had a respectable turn out but might’ve sold out if more people had connected his name — “The truth is that I was living a dream, but it was not my dream.” So he took a break to write what was inside, emerging with a stylish new image and album, FUNNY little FEARS (which came out in May), which is more pop, way more sophisticated, and, significantly, both personal and vulnerable.
He played almost all of the album, plus the deluxe tracks during his 90-minute set, as well as a couple of covers.
The 26-year-old, who first came to Canada with Måneskin in 2022 to play a sold-out date at HISTORY and returned in 2023 to play Scotiabank Arena, had no opening act for his solo show. With the band onstage minutes before him, the tattoo-adorned singer made a subdued grand entrance wearing a white tank top and loose blue jeans with a necktie belt, launching into the rock single, “Born With a Broken Heart,” and getting the crowd going with handclaps and singalongs. He went right into the uplifting “The First Time,” again with the crowd singing along, something that happened a lot throughout the night.
“I love Toronto. I’m very happy to be here, but next time I come, I’ll make sure not to come in f**kin’ December. This is the coldest I’ve ever been in my entire life,” he said. “o now, ladies and gentleman, we’re going to do a spicy one. It’s called ‘Cinnamon.’”
He humorously encouraged a fashion trend, putting on gigantic white earmuffs, but demonstrating that he’d found another use for them: between his legs, with one muff like a rabbit tail on his butt and the other on his crotch. “I think it’s going to be a new trend for 2026,” he joked. “Next winter I expect to see all of you with that.”
Courtesy: Tom Pandi
David, who always slips in a cover song on this tour, because he said, “I think it’s the best way to homage other artists that we love. And I think that we should all be less b*tches and do it more because it’s fun and music is not a competition,” did a faithful rendition of Bruno Mars’ “Locked out of Heaven” before “slowing it down for a romantic one,” the moody Mark Ronson/Miley Cyrus ballad “Nothing Breaks Like A Heart.”
“Thank you very much, see you in a bit,” he unexpectedly said, not even a half-hour after he had taken the stage. The band continued to play and David came back out a few minutes later, shirtless, at the mic, picking a collared check shirt off the hanger, buttoning it up, tucking it in and rolling up the sleeves as he talked:
“I always use this moment to try to explain what I was imagining when we built the show. And I wanted to divide the show in three different parts that could represent three different moments of my life. And what we saw so far represented the last 10 years of my life and of my career.”
He mentioned he is the lead singer of Måneskin — not that anyone there needed reminding, but, of note, he also talked in the present tense which means they might return — “and we actually come from Italy” — that one elicited cheers from the many Italians in the audience. “We gained global success in like 12 hours. It was pretty f**king weird, but it was so exciting. And since then, we started touring the world over and over and playing in every place that we could ever imagine.
“And for a long time it has been a dream come true and I was the happiest person in the world, until one day something broke, not in the band, but inside of me, and I wasn’t enjoying it anymore. It was too much. It was too much pressure, too much traveling, too much of everything. And so, I had to take a break.”
He said during this hiatus, he wrote this solo album and understood why he was “so, so sad.” He wasn’t living his dream.
“And through this record I understood how important it is to actually be able to do what we feel inside of us rather than what the label or people want.”
Courtesy: Tom Pandi
He then played the ballad “Perfect Life,” about wasting your time on the wrong thing and feeling stuck (the phone flashlights went up). Another ballad “Sick of Myself,” which really highlights his vocal range, “The Bruise” and lilting “Tangerine” followed, before he left the stage again, this time changing into a black pleated blouse and pleated taupe pants.
The final set included the upbeat “Zombie Lady,” reportedly about his fiancée Dove Cameron. For “Angel,” he got the audience to sing “over” oh-oh-oh-ver again.
“Sadly, we got to the last song for tonight,” he said before “Mars.” “It’s a very special song for me because this was the first time, this song, that I was able to speak about my feelings and my relationship in another way that I was never able to do throughout my whole career,
“So I really love this song because, for me, it really represents for me the day I became an adult as a songwriter, and that’s why I wanted to close the show with this one. It’s a song that talks about love in the most honest and open way that I know.”
Thinking it really was the last song, people started pouring out of the venue, but he was back to sing “This First Time” again.
“I know I said it before but this time it’s true. This is gonna be the last song for tonight.
“It’s not only the song that closes the show, but it’s the song that closes the whole project and there’s a reason,” he said. “When I started doing this record, I knew that I was going to be criticized and everything, but when it came out people really had a lot to talk , more than I expected [laughs) and, normally, I would have got offended and angry and pissed but this time I didn’t, and the reason is because that I knew — and I still know why — is that this whole thing, it was for me and it was not to make anybody happy, but me.
“And I actually did it. I made myself happy.
“And this song talks about this, it talks about how important it is for me and I think for everyone to be the only one deciding who we are and how we look and who we love and what job we do and what career we want.”
He then cited a lyric in the song, “Naked” “you don’t know who you are until you don’t know who you are.” He combined the song with “Solitude (No One Understands Me).” But we think we do understand him now that he’s put FUNNY little FEARS out into the world and explained it so honestly tonight.
