Vanessa Paradis releases this Friday her 7th album, mixing pop and soul, essentially written by her husband Samuel Benchetrit.
“I wanted something solar, warm, that feels good”. Vanessa Paradis has returned to “the sources” of music that has always thrilled her, between pop 60’s and soul 70’s, for her new album to be released on Friday.
What is striking about Vanessa Paradis is the feeling of having always known her. Child, during her first televised appearance at “The School of Fans”, where she performed “Emilie Jolie” under the already won eyes of Jacques Martin and France in 1981.
Teenager, when she made a sensational debut in the Top 50 with “Joe the Taxi” in 1987. Young adult, when she confirmed her acting skills in “Elisa” against Gerard Depardieu in 1995, five years after received the Caesar the best female hope for “White Noces”. Mother for the second time, when “Divinidylle” became in 2007 his best-selling album in France …
7th opus
So many important markers, for the one whose sentimental life will have been besides a secret for anybody, which illustrate how, for thirty years, she leads with success her two careers, musical and cinematographic.
Five years separate “Love Songs” produced and directed by Benjamin Biolay, this 7th opus entitled “The sources” for which she called the British Paul Butler. The leader of the band The Bees has had the mission to dress his compositions with arrangements of strings and brass that cherishes its sponsor.
“Paul has a breathtaking talent, he’s an incredible instrumentalist, he’s the one who plays the brass on the album,” she says with wide eyes full of admiration.
To guide Butler, Vanessa Paradis had prepared a playlist. “We spent a whole day listening to him and dissecting what I was looking for in each song. There were many Americans (Aretha Franklin, Marvin Gaye, Al Green, Curtis Mayfield) but also French like Serge Gainsbourg and Jacques Dutronc in their 60’s pop period, “says the teenager who contracted the funk-soul virus with Prince .
Bright and uncluttered
The result is a neat, luminous, sometimes festive, sometimes soothing album that oscillates between song, folk, pop and bossa-nova, where it is essentially a question of love, the favorite theme of its interpreter who entrusted the words to his husband, writer and director Samuel Benchetrit, as well as Adrien Gallo (leader of BB Brunes) and writer and painter Fabio Viscogliosi.
“I appealed to these authors for their style, without giving instructions. Besides the fact that they know me very well, there is for example a great sophistication in the poetry of Samuel “, believes Vanessa Paradis for whom” the most beautiful things are often said in the simplest way “.
“These simple words”, fits into this uncluttered framework. This first single is one of six titles written by Benchetrit, as “Kiev”, top of the album from the beginning, closely related to the film “Frost” by Sarunas Bartas, where she plays a secondary role (2017).
Kiev, Rome, Ipanema
“It was written during the filming in Ukraine. It tells the story of love, in a country at war, of a couple who do not live together. Nesting these two things was a strong idea that I really liked, “she says.
From Kiev to Paris, via Los Angeles, where the album was made, by Rome, crossed in “Mio Cuore” she sings in Italian, or by Ipanema, which we guess the saudade on “We forget” , “In our world” and “Darling”, the invitation to travel is permanent. And “dream” is the most used word.
Exactly, did she become the artist she dreamed of being? ” I do not know. I did not have time to dream so far, because I started working very early. But I could not have imagined everything that happened, I would have been too greedy if I had dreamed of everything I had in my life.
