Dionysios Foivos Delivorias (born 29 September, 1973) is a Greek musician and songwriter. He was born and raised in Kallithea, Attica. Most of his songs would fall under the soft rock genre.
The son of a bank clerk and a history teacher, Foivos displayed a talent for songwriting early on. When he was 15, he sent a cassette of his work to known music producer, Manos Xatzidakis. One year later, his first album, The Parade, released. He has released eight albums to date:
- The Parade (1989)
- Life's Only Good This Way (1995)
- Mess (1998)
- The Mirror (2003)
- Outside (2007)
- The Invisible Man (2010)
- Kallithea (2015)
- ANIME (2022)
His songs often contain themes of nostalgia and identity, with plenty of deconstruction over those concepts. Although, after Kallithea, he seems to have moved on from the past. For now, at least.
Foivos also has scored for TV shows, like Serres and theater. Since 2017, he has expanded his scope beyond songwriting by producing and hosting Foivos' Terrace, a live variety show with a rotating cast of talents each week. He was approached by state channel ERT with the intent of filming some sort of adaptation, which evolved into The Numbers, a 70-minute musical comedy TV series about a less successful version of himself, who is granted the opportunity to set up his own variety show.
He is married to actress Vaso Kavalieratou and they have a daughter, Ioli.
His work provides examples of:
- Adam Westing: He plays a less successful and more pretentious version of himself in The Numbers.
- Cluster F-Bomb: Ivreopobi is basically Foivos singing every swear he can fit. In a interview, he lamented that he had to cut some out because the song was getting too long.
- Death Song: Tha Se Xanado was written after his childhood friend, Nikos Rallis, died from an autoimmune disease.
- Lyrical Dissonance: The Bastard Son is very upbeat given that the chorus is "Father, they are calling me / Father, they're saying you're dead".
- Nostalgia Filter: His most persistent theme, though often deconstructed. If anything, a lot of his nostalgic songs have him realise that the past is not all that great.
- Protest Song: Ivreopobi is very anti-army (conscription is mandatory in Greece and this was written as he did his duty), mocking it by filling the lyrics with every swear word he heard in the army.
- Serendipitous Symphony: His latest albums have the occasional one-minute track that's just an instrumental based on real life recorded sounds, like a farmers' market or a cram school.
- Revisiting the Roots: Two in a row, but in different ways.
- Kallithea was partly recorded in his childhood home, and the album is about going back home and revisting old friends and places.
- After that album had very complex, multi-layered tracks, ANIME is very light on post-processing and features mostly the acoustic guitar. In an interview, Foivos states that his goal was to make it easy for people to play them by themselves, like his earlier music.
- Self-Deprecation: He often makes fun of himself for being a nostalgic whiner.
- Tacky Tuxedo: He has an affinity for wearing these when he's hosting, be it in Foivos' Terrace or The Numbers.
- The '80s: As a child of this decade, he references it a lot, from Knight Rider to the Gulf War.
- The Mirror Shows Your True Self: The Mirror has an inversion of this. The Foivos the world sees is a reflection on a mirror that Foivos can't recognize as himself.
- Two First Names: He was named Dionysios Foivos in what he considers a Historical In-Joke, but everyone called him Foivos.
