RFI Musique - - New - Keren Ann, crime time

Keren Ann, crime time

New album, 101

Paris

28/02/2011 -

For her sixth studio album, Keren Ann has opted for her lucky number, 101, and a film noir atmosphere dominated by the colour red. In a pop record abounding with light and texture, games and poetry and sung completely in English, the young woman once more shows just how much talent she has.

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RFI Musique: What does the number 101 signify for you?
Keren Ann: It’s my favourite figure and it follows me round. I like how you write it, how it looks. It’s a palindrome with the same value as my initials (Kaph Aleph). In Hebrew, Kaph means 100 and Aleph 1. In the great story of the Bible, my favourite part is psalm 101, the text of justice. And then 101 is also the number you dial for an ambulance in Israel, and I’ve unfortunately had to use it rather a lot lately. Lastly, after a concert in Taipei, I made a floor-by-floor descent of the skyscraper Taipei 101 and I started counting down from 101 to 1: the last song on the album, which is like an abstract painting of my life, with each part finding its echo in a number.

So from the top of a skyscraper, you watched other people’s lives, like in the Hitchcock film, Rear Window. Did that feed into your songs?
Seen from up high at night, any town looks like dust, traffic and lights. It’s a universal, set image that brings to mind the infinite fragments of my life, most of which took place in an urban environment or on the road. So if I was in Rear Window, watching little bits of stories, they would be the disparate scraps of my own life. On the horizon would be road 101, on the US Pacific coast, and I’d be travelling in the tour bus…

On your record, you work with texture, light and noise. Before you get going on the creation, do you always start with this palpable texture?
I wouldn’t go into the studio just because I had some songs. I record an album if I’ve got a particular environment of sound and landscapes. Beyond the arrangements, orchestrations and production, it’s the texture of the sounds, the frequencies, pigments, a blending, an atmosphere… which is palpable, touchable, malleable.

Were you looking for a dominant colour for 101?
There’s quite a bit of light, and some woody, pinkish tones, but it was blood red that I really wanted to bring out. To set it off, I needed a range of greys, blacks and whites. Then of course some songs tend towards orange, like You Were On Fire, and sometimes grey-black moves into blue or green. But the main palette reflects the colours of crime.

These colours appear on your cover, on which you feature with a gun in your hand. What’s that all about?
I love crime films, like Hitchcock and Tarantino, I find that blood looks really good on the screen. So I wanted to transpose that charm into song. As a writer-composer, I’m always intrigued by iconic figures like thugs and cowboys and femmes fatales. And my gangster side comes out when I write. I love black humour. For me, it’s accepting life for what it is, straddled between rage and tenderness and describing it as best I can with melancholy piano playing and the light touch of the kora.

The album is linked to a particular event: your father’s illness and subsequent death. Can music alleviate unhappiness?
It isn’t directly linked to my father, in fact, but when someone you care deeply about needs you because he’s suffering, you have to stay strong and you mustn’t crack up. So I travelled non stop from the hospital to the recording studio where I was running several projects at once, and I didn’t crack. It’s what I call “being a gangster”: remaining completely calm in the face of events and the strongest emotions and constantly moving. The gangster doesn’t stop at a bit of blood, he keeps going. In this soldierly way, my father is present in each line of the album, right down to its shallowest grooves.

What keeps your art going?
My life, and the existence I lead: my love affairs, friendships and family relationships. I’m naturally quiet in my daily life, but everything comes flooding out in my art: my way of loving and hating, the way I feel loss and empathy… added to which is sadness, the prism that’s stuck on my vision. My forced optimism is always tinged with this sadness, which helps me get the right balance in life. In my music I’ve always been torn between a need to stand back and look at my feelings and this serious side that means I always end up in the thick of emotion because I wouldn’t be able to make an album without being so deeply immersed in it.

Who are your current musical influences?
I’m always going back to my fundamental teachers: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Leonard Cohen, Serge Gainsbourg, Billie Holiday and Chet Baker. And that’s it! But then I don’t know if it’s their songs I like, or if I’ve learned to live through their lyrics.

As you count down in your final song, you end with “one” God. Why?
I’m not religious, but if you choose an artist’s career, I think you have to believe in a superior being. You can give it any name you like, but I accept that it’s God.