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Emily Loizeau's second album
Walking on the wild side
Paris
09/02/2009 -
Three years on from her debut album L’Autre Bout du Monde, Emily Loizeau is back in the news with her eagerly-awaited follow-up, Pays Sauvage. This second album, prepared between the singer's country house in the Ardèche and studios in Reunion, is a rich, generous and extravagant work featuring unexpected guest appearances by Moriarty, Herman Dune, Thomas Fersen and the Reunionese 'maloya' star Danyel Waro. RFI Musique talks to the quirky "nouvelle chanson" star about the genesis of her new album.
RFI Musique: Your new album is called Pays Sauvage (Wild Country). Are the songs on it intended to conjure up images of the actual countryside or more a sort of mental landscape?
Emily Loizeau: Well, I like the idea of stories following on from one another. Pays Sauvage is actually a response to the title track on my last album, L’autre bout du monde, which was about this recurring dream I had about my father after he died. In my dream I would imagine my father was still here beside me, alive. I sat down and wrote the song Pays Sauvage the day that vision stopped haunting me. It was as if the mourning process had finally come to an end and I was ready to move on. The memory of my father started to fade and his image became more and more blurred. No matter how tragic the act of forgetting is, it forces you to turn the page and life starts to take over again. At that moment I saw this strange new land stretching out before me - a land razed by fire, wrecked by the passing storm, but a land waiting to be raised from its ashes and built up again.
Listening to Pays Sauvage it strikes me that the songs on it are less intimate and introspective than those on your first album. Pays sauvage has a more carnal in-the-body feel…
What I wanted to do with this album was to try and tap into my intuitive side and intuition means gut feelings, listening to your body. I also wanted to access a certain wildness, a certain madness this time round. That involved moving away from the polished, honed-to-perfection sound of my first album, L’autre bout du monde. I tried to make my vocals sound a bit rawer this time, too. Audiences tend to expect female singers to produce nice, soft, comforting sounds. But this time round I opted for a much more animalistic style of singing, a style that switches between being soothing and then provoking and disarming the listener. Those ideas were already there on my first album, but I never pushed them all the way. After two years out on the road on tour which meant a constant process of experimentation and confrontation with my musicians (Olivier Koundouno and Cyril Avèque) - who have both helped make me what I am today - I felt it was time to present a snapshot of me as I am now.
You produced this new album yourself. Were there any added benefits in doing so?
Well, producing your own album means you remain master of your own choices! It meant that I could work in this very intimate, organic kind of set-up with my musicians and the sound engineer. And I think we pushed our ideas all the way. We remained authentic and absolutely true to ourselves on this album.
I didn't personally know any of them before the making of this album. I have to admit that I've always loved Moriarty's music - it's the sort of music that instantly evokes childhood memories and I feel it puts me back in touch with my roots in some way. I'm a big fan of everything about Herman Dune - the songwriting, the band's whole approach to music and their total lack of compromise. As for Danyel Waro, he's this sort of "spiritual father" to me… The collaborations went way beyond the music, though. For me, this album was very much about fusing with other musicians on a personal level and creating a real sense of complicity. I wanted to move beyond our little trio and for that I needed to find artists who understood how to work together as a group. I liked the idea of us all being one big collective and creating this sort of hippie 'community' album. At the end of the day, this album was basically me inviting a bunch of folky mates to come down and make music in my house in the Ardèche! (Laughs)
So in a way this album is a celebration?
There's certainly a bit of a pagan side to Pays Sauvage, which is perfectly brought out by Danyel Waro - and by the blues in general with this whole idea of tapping into your ancestors' suffering yet making something joyful. What's this album about? It's about taking a good old bottle of whisky and a lot of guitars and trying to make a moment of life a bit special. Things won't be smooth and nice and perfect at the end of the day, but it's about playing together, celebrating life and washing all the suffering away in one big explosion of joy!
Live at L'Alhambra, Paris, 4 - 6 March 2009
Anne-Laure Lemancel
Translation : Julie Street
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