Album review

Keren Ann

'We are not a Family!'

24/05/2002 - 

Following the success of her debut album, La Biographie de Luka Philipsen, Keren Ann Zeidel has come storming back into the music news with a second album, La Disparition. Mixing soft, pastel-coloured pop with folk and blues influences and a distinctly poetic nostalgia for the 60s, the album wears a double-faced mask of joy and sorrow. And the double elements don't stop there – because Keren Ann has also recorded an alter ego English version of the album entitled The Disappearance.

Keren Ann brought the house down when she performed at Le Trianon in Paris last month, revisiting the beautiful old rococo venue where she supported her music heroine, Suzanne Vega, a little less than a year ago. After the critical success of her solo album and the phenomenal commercial success of Henri Salvador's album – partly written by Keren Ann and Benjamin Biolay (with whom Keren Ann co-writes her own albums) Keren Ann appears to have been rarely out of the media of late. But it will take a lot more than that to turn the head of this serious-minded young singer/songwriter. On her second album, La Disparition, Keren Ann comes to musical maturity with some highly original compositions inspired by everything from Yiddish influences to folk and blues – not to mention her ongoing fascination with the technicolour productions of George Martin and Burt Bacharach! RFI/Musique caught up with France's new first lady of chanson in a chic Paris hotel and asked her a few questions about her career to date.

RFI/Musique: This is the second time you've chosen to go off and record your album in Brussels at the ICP studio complex…
Keren Ann: When you've got musical programmers like Yannic Fonderie and John Hastri at ICP who stand there and welcome you with open arms, why work anywhere else? It's great working at the ICP because you can treat the place like home. The problem with working in Paris is you get up in the morning and you've got this whole other life going on – you can't cut yourself off from the world completely and just concentrate on recording! It's really difficult to immerse yourself in the ambience of the album. One of the brilliant things about working at ICP is that you can sleep there too. You get up in the morning and you're straight into the ambience. You can start recording immediately. You only leave the studio to go out and watch a film in the evening and then get a bit of sleep. It's wonderful to have the means - and the time – to experiment with different things. Working like that means that every now and then you get these "little shafts of light"…I was able to experiment with new things like the harp and the sound of a choir. Those were things which happened spontaneously on the new album and were really easy to integrate.

What exactly do you mean by "little shafts of light"?
What I mean is that for the first time in my life I managed to achieve a balance of happiness and sadness. Having joy and sorrow exist side by side like that is a real first for me!

I was particularly intrigued by the sound of the choir on your new album – especially on the title track La Disparition which sounds a lot like a Christmas carol. I found that quite surprising given your Yiddish/Slavic roots which also come across on the album…
Yes, that's it, exactly! Your interpretation sounds pretty spot-on to me. There's a very Christian feel to La Disparition and I suppose the song is almost a Christmas carol in a way. But you have to realise I'm a whole mix of cultures. My mother's of Catholic origin and my father's a Jew - and I actually feel that now for the first time in my life I've finally understood where I come from. As I said before, I really feel that I managed to achieve a balance on this album, a balance where joy and sorrow, happiness and sadness, Catholicism and Judaism can exist side by side. La Disparition has got a lot to do with my Yiddish side too. It reflects the "Judeo" side of the Judeo-Christian education I had if you like. In the "Judeo" side of things you don't have to organise a special ceremony or anything to talk about death. And that's a very Jewish, very Yiddish take on things. One of the interesting things I discovered just as we were approaching the end of the recording sessions was the work of Guerasim Luka. I didn't know his work before at all. Guerasim Luka was a poet who was born in Bucharest and one of his most famous lines is «If you empty the void of its emptiness what you're left with is fullness». Luka ended up throwing himself off the Pont Neuf in 1994, saying «I'm through with this world where there's no place for poets». That's a very Christian, very Goy vision of things. You see, I think what I've finally come to understand at the age of 28 is that we really have no control over our death. Guerasim Luka is an example of someone who actually chose his own death. But unfortunately there's also the example of John Lennon who represents exactly the opposite – his death proved that we're not actually in control of our final fate at all, anything can happen. So, in a nutshell, what I guess I'm saying on La Disparition is that I've come to terms with the fact that I'm in control of my life but not my death.

Reading between the lines, both musically and lyrically speaking, La Disparition also seems to be a roundabout tribute to George Martin?
Yes, it's funny you should mention that because I spent a lot of time listening to the Beatles' White album before we started recording.

And what about while you were recording? What did you listen to then?
Chet Baker mainly. As far as vocals are concerned I listen to a lot of Chet Baker – and Karen Carpenter too. I think my new album's got a touch of American folk to it somewhere, in fact.

And a bit of a blues edge too, no?
Yes, there's something of the blues going on too, a blues with the spectre of Tom Waits hanging over it somewhere. And that's something I admit I have a lot of trouble doing in French!

Talking of the English/French divide, you perform the song Road Bin live on stage and you've included it on the English version of your album. Which is interesting because Road Bin is maybe the one sole track where you play hell for leather – and it's completely absent from the album in French.
Well, the thing is, I just can't do fast songs in French! Road Bin represents my blues side, but I was absolutely incapable of transcribing it into French. And that's the simple reason the song's not included on the French version of the album. But I don't feel anything's missing from the French album – on the contrary, I feel it's completely finished as it is.

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't implying the French version of the album was boring or anything – far from it, in fact!
Yes, I know. I think one thing I've finally come to accept as far as my voice is concerned is that I just don't have a range spanning four octaves – but because of the linear style of my voice, I am capable of making notes last.

There are a couple of tracks on the new album though where you push your voice to the limit and it gets this squeaky fragile edge à la Jane Birkin…
Yes, on Le Chien d’avant garde. It gets to the point where I'm almost screaming, in fact. It's a real blues number.
There are a broad range of influences on La Disparition, of course. And there's even a bit of a trip hop feel on La Corde et les chaussons, where the Vocoder¹ and the harmoniser bring a certain electro influence…
Yes, that's true. It's a Vocoder harmoniser, in fact, with its own integrated auto-tuner. I think the truth of the matter is that La Corde et les chaussons is actually a very funk-influenced song, you know, you've just got guitar and vocals going on. I've got a bit of a perverse side to me somewhere where I really love r'n'b. I just love Destiny Child's Bootylicious loop – which is kind of funny in a way because that's not at all the culture I grew up with. But you know how it is – after all, you were the first journalist to accept that James Taylor was more soul than folk! - you know that somewhere down the line folk and soul actually meet up. I was lucky enough to have Benjamin [Biolay] working with me and one day he turned round and said: «Listen, what we'll try and do is mix in an r'n'b loop». And he was brilliant he worked the loop into the track with such style and elegance. And I thank him from the bottom of my heart because I know very well that I would never have dared put folk and r'n'b back to back. I was so afraid that if I did I'd destroy the song. But Benjamin took the bull by the horns and by gradually mixing in this Joni Mitchell sample, he pulled it off. He turned the song into an absolute musical gem!

His sister, (singer) Coralie Clément, once claimed that «Keren Ann belongs to an entirely different universe to me – and it's a much less playful one! »
Well, I'd say she's right. Everyone's always asking me whether I feel like I belong to a "family" – and my answer's always no! I think Benjamin and Coralie create totally different musical universes. And I'd say the same's true of Benjamin and I. Our solo albums sound radically different from one other, you know.

Musically speaking perhaps, but you can't deny that there are certain similarities going on. You both appear to have the same fascination for the 60s, for instance…
Well, I'm obsessed with the past in general. Sometimes I feel that my entire life exists just so that I can look back and deconstruct the past. My psychological make-up's just not geared towards the concept of tomorrow – it's something I can't even conceive! The thing with the past is you can really grasp it, you know what yesterday was made of because it continues to exist in us somewhere, so we can analyse it and file it away in our memory somewhere. We know what it represents. But tomorrow's a completely different story! … We haven't got a clue about tomorrow! I think the thing is, life doesn't exist without the past. We're made up of everything we've lived through in a way. And this obsession with the past is something that's very strong in me. I feel like I was born with lots of open drawers and I've made a conscious decision not to close them, but to sit down and explore the contents instead. That being the case, I've obviously got a whole lot of different stuff in me like the 30s and a lot of Eastern European influences. There's a strong Yiddish side to me. Going back to your last question, I don't know whether my "musical universe" is less playful or not. I'd say it's more a case of joy and sorrow existing side by side. These days I'm OK with the idea of getting up in the morning and enjoying the fact it's going to be a beautiful day. But it's taken me a long time to get there! That's not something I ever felt when I was a teenager, for instance. In my teens I honestly never felt life could ever exist in colour – that's something I had to learn from other people! I'd say that's something I've come to terms with on La Disparition, in fact. You can disappear and assume those absences if you know that the sun exists in winter, that there's something coming afterwards.

Does Benjamin Biolay's "Gainsbourg" side ever bother you?
No, because I feel I've got that side to me too. I grew up in that culture and absorbed French chanson through Gainsbourg. Gainsbourg's rooted deep inside me in such a natural way that his influence can't help but come out somewhere – although, having said that, I think Gainsbourg's a lot more present in Benjamin's songs than he is in mine.

So you'd accept the fact that you and Benjamin do belong to the same "family" somewhere?
I wish people would stop this whole "family" thing!… We're not a family and that's that. It's not like we see each other every day or anything – we see each other for work full stop! Benjamin's not part of my family, he's more like a soul mate or a sort of alter ego, someone with whom I feel I can work simply and naturally. If I ever have the experience of finishing work on a song and then I hate it, I can't even sit down and listen to what I've done, I know I can call Benjamin and say: «Can't you do something to make me like it?». The problem is, I can't work on my own all the time because I end up hating what I've done! That doesn't make us a family though!… I may have taken 28 years to understand what a family is, but I've understood it now. Family are the people you call when things are going wrong, the people you love and hate at the same time, the people you'd do anything to help even though they've completely wounded you in the past. That's not Benjamin's role in my life. And I'm staring to get a bit tired of everyone hooking us up on the same family tree all the time! We're not a family, we just fuse perfectly… on an artistic level!

¹ An electronic device which gives the voice a metallic, robotic edge.

Keren Ann La Disparition Capitol France
Coming soon: The Disappearance Capitol France

Gérard  Bar-David

Translation : Julie  Street