The Italian western is back (or maybe it never went away)

The demonstration is 'Spaghetti Western Collection', a collection that is a sound trip between Morricone and psychedelia curated by producer and director Jeymes Samuel.

The Rolling Stone

By Giovanni Coppola

June 17, 2025

"I was five years old. My father had prepared a crumpet for me, then another. When he said "enough!", I started crying. My mother had gone out and one of those Italian westerns was playing on TV. It bewitched me." This is the first story with the genre that tells us Jeymes Samuel, aka The Bullitts, on a video call from his studio in London.

Director, musician, producer (and younger brother of singer Seal), Samuel is an artist who brings together talents and genres like few others. After working with Jay-Z on the soundtrack of Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, collaborating with artists such as Doja Cat and Jay Electronica, he now signs the new release (scheduled for June 20) of CAM Sugar Spaghetti Western Collection, a collection that is dirty with the dust of the all-Italian western between Morricone and psychedelia, cinema and sound.

Twenty tracks — from Caterina Caselli to Nico Fidenco, passing through Piero Umiliani and Alessandro Alessandroni — unreleased tracks, a deluxe vinyl, a hand-painted cover by himself. The Spaghetti Western Collection is not a compilation; it is a film on vinyl closely linked to his childhood and his way of understanding art: “I wanted something that was not obvious. Not only the classics, but those pieces that stick with you explains.”

And it's true: no jukebox greatest hits. It's rough, crooked, sideways stuff, but straight to the heart, in which Morricone dialogues with Peter Tevis, the guns rhyme with female voices and the horns seem to come out of a free-jazz jam: "That Italian sound was revolutionary. Surf rock, jazz and something mystical: they used instruments as colors. Everything was so advanced, but at the same time incredibly pop," he continues.

Because for Samuel the spaghetti western is not nostalgia or fetish: "It was freedom. And then also something deeply black. In those films there was the possibility for anyone to be the hero, without even realizing it. It didn't matter if you were Italian, African, American. Really not. That world was anarchic, radical, without borders."

And the object he wanted to build is also anarchic: a vinyl that is also a small work of art. The cover, hand-painted by himself, cites Michael Jackson's Off the Wall by portraying a cowboy. Inside the boxset, on the other hand, interviews with Regina King and David Oyelowo, original posters, CAM Sugar archive scores. Everything sounds like something out of a forgotten film, but with today's groove: "I thought that every element should be able to speak the same language. Like in movies: image, sound, rhythm, story. Everything has to tell the same thing."

Meanwhile, SamuelContinue Writing Western, even when we ask him to improvise one that is inspired by that world there, today. "A man comes back after fourteen years. His wife thought he was dead, but he changed: he became a killer. The ending? She kills him. It's a tragedy. A full-blown western ballad," he says.

While he is telling, LaKeith Stanfield, rapper, actor and friend of Samuel, bursts into his FaceTime, laughing it off live by launching into an improvised ode: "Jeymes Samuel is the best living director on earth. A brilliant man and a visionary. Write it down, people need to know."

To close our exchange, The Bullitts leaves us with the memory of one of the most powerful images of the genre, quoting Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence: "I've never seen such a radical ending. You think there's a final confrontation, and instead the hero dies. The villain leaves. No justice, no revenge: that's it. Not even a scene after the credits. A blow! I've never seen anything like it."

There is something both sacred and profane in the way Samuel traverses these worlds. The lost reels of CAM, the hands that paint a cover, the voices of the past that come back to life. It is in Sergio Leone's western that Samuel has found his definitive language, and this collection is a declaration of love to that sound, that aesthetic and everything it can still tell.