Juliette Armanet: "I'm with a man because he's the one who took my heart, but it could be a woman"

She arrives at the headquarters of her record label, out of breath, her bangs tousled, her eyes shining.

Everything is smiling, relaxed and playful in its look: the loose angora sweater, the pretty shoulder that lets you see it, the iridescent eyelids, the hem of the flared jeans that play with platform boots,

period Elton John style .

One disc will have been enough for Juliette Armanet to capsize our hearts.

Released in 2018,

awarded a Victoire de la musique for the best album of the year, revealed a singer in a sensual face-to-face with her black Steinway.

To read also Juliette Armanet: "I had the choice between consuming myself in the flames of a breakup or burning my songs"

His pop melodies were soft, his lyrics exhilarating, his voice bordered on danger between malty tones and sustained notes.

Eyes closed, she transformed love blues into unifying hymns.

"She's a timeless romantic and I'm not taking any risks by saying that she has Sagan's pen," Alain Souchon told us.

There is a sadness and a hello in his voice.

It inevitably pleases, because it is moving, full of audacity, of modernity.

Originally from Lille, Juliette landed in Paris in 2016 with an EP entitled

and became, in record time, the new fiancée of the French.

A year later, with

the public and the critics extolled her.

Ex-director of documentaries, Juliette Armanet was 33 years old: "There is no age to embark on creation," she says confidently.

After sold-out tours and feverish concerts (including a performance in front of Barack Obama), the singer-songwriter and mother of a baby boy – Abel, 4 – has done much more than meet the challenge of a second album : she has outdone herself.

Between solar disco and upheavals of the soul,

is an intimate album that makes you want to dance until dawn.

In video, the clip of “Tu Me Play” by Juliette Armanet

Surrounded by sequined curtains, liberating lasers and a disco ball that shines like a night sun, Armanet returns with five unreleased tracks - delivered in a reissue box set entitled

- and shows throughout France, including a highly anticipated Accor Arena and Zenith Paris.

In the midst of an aesthetic metamorphosis, she also began an artistic collaboration with the house of Dior, which signed her new stage costumes, between dramaturgy and glamour.

Miss Figaro.

– Before choosing the path of music, you were a documentary filmmaker for Arte for eight years.

What were your favorite themes?

I made films on social issues.

, for example, told of women's relationship to this garment.

In another, I talked about ugliness and extraordinary physique through testimonials.

Many were centered on education, the abuse of power over children: punishment, incest… Sometimes they were more personal, like

 : a film about my maternal grandmother, a very strong woman born in the 1920s. She was a classical pianist and suffered from Alzheimer's disease.

She had forgotten everything and wrote down her life in a notebook – “I was married, I had two children, grandchildren…” But the music remained indelible: her hands ran over the piano keys until the end.

When I played Debussy or Chopin, she protested as soon as I got a note wrong.

Music was his territory of freedom, his only place of consciousness.

It was she who taught my mother the piano, a virtuoso.

Your father is also a musician…

He is a pianist and composer, but more jazz and French song.

As a child, I heard my parents playing day and night.

Their passion for the piano is the foundation of their story.

I think I played on their knees from the age of 6 months.

They also surrounded me with books, took me to exhibitions and ballets.

They were interested in everything, politics, major social debates… I grew up in an artistic and cultural maelstrom.

This is probably the reason why, at school, I wrote on my information sheet: "I want to be a journalist and a singer."

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Juliette Armanet is wearing technical knit pants and jacket, D-Air Lab × Dior.

Personal shoes.

Bojana Tatarska

At what age did you start singing?

I have always composed and sung in my room, alone, in privacy, to calm myself down.

I wanted people to know that I made music, but I had a form of modesty.

I feared that this ritual would lose its magical power and its authenticity if I made a career out of it.

What was the trigger that made you choose the music?

After making about ten films for Arte, I worked for programs on criminal cases as a journalist.

At the same time, I had started taking my keyboard on set and playing in my hotel room at night.

One day, I had had enough of this double life.

I decided to go explore my artistic side.

The inner timing is mysterious: until I was 30, I felt like my music didn't sound like me.

I was looking for myself, singing with a deeper voice, close to the expressionist cabaret – I actually started the scene by singing in a cabaret.

When I decided to invest myself only in music,

and

.

The rest followed.

Singing has become for me a power grab over my emotions.

Your album

It's exactly that.

It is an ardent declaration of love, hence the title of the disc.

I had a choice between being consumed by the flames of a breakup or burning my songs, which I did.

This record is a eulogy to passion because these emotions, which sometimes push us to the brink of breaking, are also the ones that keep us alive.

People often ask me if these songs accurately tell what I experienced.

I don't like this question, because I am convinced that our lives are made up of all our inner fictions.

Fictions of the self are the best way to know yourself.

Romain Gary, a master in literary mystification, borrowed imaginary names for his novels and lived in the skin of his characters.

These emotions, which sometimes push us to the brink of breaking, are also the ones that keep us alive.

Juliet Armanet

Do you follow a ritual, a discipline to find inspiration?

I am very inspired by radio voices.

I listen to a program every day:

by Marie Richeux,

by Fabrice Drouelle… I love Guillaume Gallienne's podcasts.

While listening, I notice formulations that interest me.

And then I read a lot, always with a pencil in my hand.

I fill notebooks of hundreds of pages with words and expressions that serve to feed my imagination.

When I compose, I hang them all over the walls around me.

I prepare the conditions to create it and I remain receptive.

Étienne Daho says that creation is a state of hypnosis.

It's true: a door opens and you enter a place where everything seems familiar.

The song is born and there is a form of amnesia afterwards.

This was really the case for

 : I wrote it in a few hours.

Christophe had just died, I was devastated, and this funny expression that I had pasted on the wall, “the last day of disco”, lit the spark.

We find on this album your taste for disco, already present on pieces of your first disc, like

What I like about disco is the relationship between the night and its dangers.

There must be darkness for everything to sparkle, darkness for sensuality to be released.

I am fascinated by the glamor that only exists at night.

I love the meeting between disco, groove and techno that we hear with Giorgio Moroder when he produces

for Donna Summer, or that of Earth, Wind and Fire on

 : venomous basslines, hypnotic loops made for drugs, sex, partying, body abandonment.

Disco can only shine if you are in a club in the dark, like the dazzling lights of Caravaggio's paintings only reveal themselves thanks to areas of absolute penumbra.

The disco, at the beginning, it is an insolent music, of contestation, of club.

A music that brings together, at night, those who are not tolerated during the day: blacks, homosexuals, non-standards.

She is there to bring people together, to make us all dance together.

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Juliette Armanet is wearing a spencer and embroidered wool and silk waistcoat, silk blouse, cotton gabardine trousers, the Dior ensemble.

Personal shoes.

Photo Bojana Tatarska

We note your extraordinary physical presence and your atypical beauty.

What relationship do you have with your image?

My physique does not correspond to the stereotypical feminine criteria and I was very complexed.

All my teenage years, I hid in oversized clothes.

I have a tomboy side, little chest and I'm never fantasized as a woman.

I don't wear skirts and I've always stolen my dad's shirts, like I'm huge, even though I'm 1.58m tall.

During my first concerts, I hid behind the piano and dressed in black, with turtlenecks, so that my body could not be seen.

It was also an intellectual fantasy, a desire that only my songs be heard.

This disc, with its exalted orchestral arrangements, produced a metamorphosis in me.

I needed to embody the songs more than before and naturally, one evening, in the middle of a concert,

I got up from my stool and I danced… I even got on my piano.

I took ownership of my body and started wearing heels, low cuts and sparkly suits.

Becoming a mother has helped you feel better about yourself?

When I was young, I was told that I could never have children, which traumatized me.

Getting pregnant changed my relationship to femininity.

I had taken a lot of pounds, but I felt good, fulfilled.

I perceived a power in my body which gave me confidence in myself.

I even sang on stage until eight and a half months pregnant.

Now I'm a mother of a 4-year-old boy, with whom I do wild dances on Paco de Lucía.

And like all working women, I juggle between dream schedules and reality.

My husband helps me, but he's on tour a lot too.

He is a light scenographer.

The spirit of disco has also inspired the stage costumes, which are Dior creations, for your next shows...

My encounter with the Dior house took place through creation: we are in the process of imagining the outfits which I will wear on my next tour.

I will do a show in three acts, with a stage costume for each.

The first is a jumpsuit covered in small mirrors, sewn one by one by hand, which reflect each other like a disco ball.

It is inspired by the cult jacket worn by Michael Jackson in the

The other garments visually translate elements, such as fire, flames and light, which run through each track on my album.

Maria Grazia Chiuri

and I work hand in hand.

I am fascinated by his creativity.

I like the Dior know-how, the rigor and austerity in Maria Grazia's work, her courage to engage in debates on feminism, gender, ecology.

There is an enormous responsibility of the fashion world today to speak out on the question of the traceability of clothing or the representation of identity.

The terms "gender fluidity", "non-binarity", "transidentity" have become common in language and reflect a societal revolution visible in the world of music.

How do you live it?

She participates in some of my fictions.

Right now, I'm exploring my part of femininity.

But my androgynous body, my attitude, being raised with two brothers meant that I never asked myself whether I was a woman or a man.

I don't care at all.

Even when it comes to romantic relationships: today I'm with a man because he's the one who took my heart, but it could be a woman.

I don't want to gender myself, define myself and freeze myself, because it would be like imprisoning something that is constantly moving.

The societal revolution that we are experiencing has freed speech: we have named ways of perceiving ourselves that could not be expressed.

It's joyful,

very positive but you have to be careful not to open doors to close them later.

Because, above all, we are nothing in ourselves: our identity is mirrored through that of the other.

It's a strange fantasy that of a humanity that wants to define itself ex nihilo from the rest of the world.

It's almost a desire for self-creation.

I'm not into it at all.

I am extremely permeable and porous vis-à-vis what surrounds me and I feel it more than ever in concert.

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Juliette Armanet is wearing a tube knit jumpsuit, D-Air Lab × Dior.

Bojana Tatarska

We also hear the term “sorority” a lot to describe a bond between all the young French singers.

Is she real?

Yes.

I have regular exchanges with Christine & the Queens, whose work I admire.

She captures the times.

Angèle is always adorable with me, very encouraging.

I talk a lot with Izïa Higelin, who has a child the same age as mine.

I love Barbara Pravi, Fishbach, Jeanne Added and Aloïse Sauvage… I recommend the new novel,

, by Blandine Rinkel, singer of the group Catastrophe.

Like me, these singers are also songwriters: this allows us to control our careers and to be more independent than those who came before us.

The singers of the previous generation learned through the media what one thought of the other.

Now we communicate directly through social media.

Moreover, the word "sorority" bothers me a little because it freezes a concept on an attitude.

I feel a desire to speak to each other “truthfully”, which is more and more part of this era.

But the competition between us exists.

We cannot ignore it.

We are horses in a race, that's obvious.

More than this term therefore, I would use “benevolence”.

It sounds fairer

because we are still in a patriarchal, competitive and violent system.

We must stay alert and encourage each other.

Burning Fire 2,

expanded reissue of five titles, Universal.

In concert on March 17, 2023, at the Accor Arena, in Paris, and on tour in the Zéniths of France: November 23, at the Zénith de Paris, November 17 in Nantes, November 18 in Lille, November 26 in Bordeaux, December 1 in Toulouse.