From singer Barbara to a heroine of Miyazaki, master of Japanese animation: Apple, crowned at the Victoires de la Musique in 2021, signs a third album where
“every song or almost is addressed”
to a female figure who inspired her .
One of the rare exceptions of
Consolation
, a disc released on Friday August 26, is
When I cu
(
“When I see you”
phonetically,
“When I see you”
), the only piece in English and a pure folk gem, while elsewhere electro flush.
This is the song that served to unlock the singer-songwriter, now her own producer.
Because despite the public and critical success that followed
Les Failles
(her second opus in 2019), the artist found herself faced with
“mini-anxiety attacks”
when entering the studio.
In her nightmares, the one who is not yet thirty saw
“people”
who
“looked at her, arms crossed”
to
“judge”
her, as she tells AFP.
"I listened to my intuitions for
Les Failles
and it worked, but it brought me an audience that I didn't have before, so a source of anxiety for the new album"
.
Ward off evil by putting it on paper in English,
"to trap"
his
"brain"
tormented, on an intuition of his sound engineer, was liberating.
Taking up the pattern of
“letters never sent”
that she wrote as a child
“to free herself from certain things”
, her bewitching voice now serves songs addressed to women who matter, real or fictitious, rubbed shoulders or not.
Because as we feel in the titles
Garden
and
In my dreams
, childhood has not always rhymed with carelessness.
"I was very melancholy, sad, a child quite difficult to understand, I didn't feel like I was in the right family, for example
," she begins.
"Like an anomaly"
"When I discovered that I liked girls, I realized that's why I felt like an anomaly before, that I didn't feel like my girlfriends"
.
Today the “
conflicting relations”
with brother, sisters and parents are appeased.
“I wanted to be like you then I hated you
,” she sings in the introduction to
In My Dreams
.
"I'm talking about my mother,
" she says.
I admired her, but she was very Christian and this religion was reticent towards lesbians or gays, and I said to myself
“
if my mother rejects me, it is not possible to love her
”
.
She's smart, she'll understand that part of the song."
, she explains.
In an interview, the artist today thanks his mother for having introduced his children to the cartoons of the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, which were full of powerful women long before this term existed.
One of them, Chihiro, is also mentioned in the piece
La rivière
.
Apple had already taken over in Japanese a title from the soundtrack
of Spirited Away
, which had opened the door to performances in Japan.
Track
B
is dedicated to Barbara -
"a shock when I was eight"
- while
Nelly
pays tribute to Nelly Arcan, an author from Quebec (where Pomme spends half her time) who committed suicide before her 40th birthday .
With her
"crude, unfiltered style"
, this woman of letters wrote about her sexuality,
"obsessed with the gaze of men, yielding to cosmetic surgery, which at the same time destroyed her"
, as Apple summarizes.
Despite these references,
Consolation
has nothing compelling and the end of a title like
Bleu
even offers an electro cavalcade - signed by Flavien Berger, craftsman of a delicate electro and co-producer of the album - which prefigures a new breath on stage.
/cloudfront-eu-central-1.images.arcpublishing.com/prisa/HCD4VSRM6VHKTEK6OQ5QZXVVO4.jpg)
