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Cocoon
French neo-folk
Paris
24/10/2008 -
Morgane: We hooked up around three years ago now. Mark had already started recording demos under the name Cocoon back in October 2005 and he came up with the idea of posting his songs on a website with an ad. announcing that he was looking for a female singer. I liked what I heard, answered the ad. and the great Cocoon love story began…
Mark: I met quite a lot of singers through that ad. actually. From the moment I started out, I knew I wanted to form a male/female duo based on piano, guitar and vocals. That idea was always very clear in my head. And I knew that the duo could only function if there was perfect harmony between the two voices. That's basically what clicked with Mo' and me, our voices just fitted together way better than any of the other singers I tried out in auditions. Our voices complement one another perfectly in terms of texture, frequency and artistic sensibility. It might sound big-headed to say it, but in everything I've listened to - apart from maybe Simon & Garfunkel - I've never heard two voices so obviously destined to go together!
What are Cocoon's musical influences? Your album seems to be in the same vein as the "neo-folk" movement going on in the U.S. right now with artists like Sufjan Stevens, Elvis Perkins…
Mark: Well, ever since I was a teenager I've listened to a whole lot of folk. At one point recently I had what I call my 'archaeologist' moment, trawling back from 2008 to the 1920s and 1930s and working my way right back to the roots of Irish folk. Then I delved into the blues and that whole movement that spawned American folk. So basically Cocoon's musical inspiration goes all the way from groups like Pentangle and Fairport Convention right through to the 'new folk' movement that surfaced around the beginning of 2000 with artists like Cocorosie, Devendra Banhart and Sufjan Stevens… We loved Elvis Perkins' album Ash Wednesday and this year we're really into Bon Iver, Fleet Foxes and stuff like that… But our influences are not just musical. We draw a lot of our inspiration from cinema as well. We're both big fans of Jim Jarmusch, Sofia Coppola and Abel Ferrara. I also get a lot of songwriting ideas from reading. I'm into authors like Jack London and Joseph Conrad. So with influences like that I think it's inevitable that we've ended up singing in English!
Morgane: I can honestly say we never even asked ourselves the question of whether we should sing in one language or another. Our songs just came naturally to us. We're motivated by a real passion for the English language, a real love of Anglo-Saxon culture…
Mark: It's true, there is a big debate going on about that right now. The Ayatollahs of French 'chanson' are still firmly in place. But personally I can't help it, I'd rather listen to a million Moriartys than a Christophe Maé or a Christophe Willem! Having said that, though, there's a public out there for all of them. French artists singing in English isn't something new. It goes back to groups like Les Thugs and Syd Matters who was one of the first French artists to sing in English about eight years ago now. Syd Matters was a bit unlucky because people wouldn't play his records on French radio. But we've sort of popped up in the right place at the right time. French radio stations are a lot braver these days. OK, so there's still the whole quota system*, but I think we're finally good enough to compete with music coming out of the U.S. and the U.K. and sometimes we even come up with stuff that's better! This year, Cocoon's single On My Way was one of the most frequently played songs on French radios. And there's a bit of a trend now for artists singing in English with singers like Aaron and Yaël Naim doing really well. So you've got all these record labels trying to sign their own Yaël Naim and their own Cocoon.
It must have been a big challenge writing and recording an entire album in English?
Mark: It was actually really hard writing and singing in English from beginning to end. When I'm writing songs I manage to get myself into this trance-like state close to yoga and in that kind of intense state of concentration I find myself actually thinking in English. I get all these crazy expressions coming into my head like "to be under the weather" - where there's not even an equivalent in French!… I actually lived in London for a year when I was a student but apart from that I haven't really spent much time in English-speaking countries. It's funny, some people have told me that quite a few of our songs are evocative of the American mid-West. But I think if we'd ever actually been to the States our songs would be a lot less powerful because we'd have seen the mid-West for what it really is. The Cocoon take on the U.S. is pure fantasy! I have to admit, I'd be scared to go to the States, because I don't want to lose this whole myth I had as a child about America being this land of wide, open spaces and log cabins hidden in the middle of snowy woods… My dream would be to go off like the guy in the Sean Penn movie "Into The Wild"** and record an album in some remote cabin, hunting deer for food…
To me, there's a big contrast between the rather morbid-sounding title of your album and Cocoon's music which is actually pretty light and upbeat despite its melancholy streak…
Mark: What happened was I was writing a song called Take Off (the opening track on the album) and this line just came into my head: "All my friends died in a plane crash." I'd actually just lost a lot of people close to me who'd either died or left. And the shock was so sudden, so violent, that that image of a plane crash really translated what I was feeling at that point. I knew that after that loss I 'd have to go through a period of mourning and I ended up working through my grief and emotion on the eleven other songs that make up the abum. The contrast between the loss of those loved ones and the loss of childhood, being suddenly forced into adulthood in such a violent way meant that we had to do an album to get through it all.
**An adaptation based on the true story of Christopher McCandless, a young American wanderer who hiked off into the Alaskan wilderness.
Cocoon My Friends All Died In a Plane Crash (Sober & Gentle/Discographie) 2007
Julie Street
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