Chubby and shaggy, preferring floppy hats and round glasses, Lucio Dalla didn’t look much like a pop star. A jazz clarinetist who reinvented himself as a singer-songwriter, Dalla nonetheless became one of Italy’s most beloved troubadours in the closing decades of the 20th century.

His songs were rhapsodic and discursive, polemical and observant—often in the span of a single verse—and his voice could shift from conversational intimacy to full-throated passion just as quickly.