Les Grands Brûlés / Tarabust

REGARDE

It started with a vinyl's run out groove, that funny endless, creaking rhythm nestled at the end of a side of a record. Benjamin from Almost Music inspired me to build a song out of that and then I thought why not use other run out grooves for other songs? Small challenges like this speak to me, they unblock me. And voila, my new EP.

"Regarde" is an idea of a mirror that reflects a mirror. Two strangers come face to face and decide to forget what they heard about each other. They rise above prejudices. Who looks at who in the end? They rely on the purity of the first glance, the truth of the encounter in the physical world, to find out what the universe has in store for them.

DEBOUT

I started a song originally called " Tout le monde s'en fout " (No one gives a shit) just after Macron's stolen victory. I was infuriated that the puppet of a few billionaires was the only other choice for French people outside the far right. That said, I was badly placed to comment. I had just relocated to Melbourne, Australia. Eventually I too ended up not giving a shit and the song ended up in the drawers of my computer until the fluorescent Yellow Vests appeared in the streets of France. I was stirring my wooden spoon in my sugo di pomodoro when I started humming " Tout le monde est debout " (everyone is standing up) to that old tune I had almost forgotten. I put the song back on the workbench and it developed alongside the social and ecological struggles that have ensued since. It is a gentle ode to rebellion. Hats off to all those who stand up in the face of authoritarianism, in the face of all forms of discrimination, in the face of ultra-liberal policies that destroy what is most beautiful in us and around us.

OUVERTURE

For the second time, after my song "Oubliez-moi", I knocked on the door of the good old French poet Eugène Guillevic, with his beard collar, his thick glasses and his woollen sailor's cap. His words always inspire me to make music more lyrical than usual, more whimsical. I could spend my life adapting his poetry into songs. He is for me the poet of the sacred, the sacred being an absolute mystery and yet just within reach, accessible and intimate as ever. When I write my songs it is precisely this mystery after which I run, around which I turn, in whose shade I walk, in whose arms I dance. Sometimes my quest tires. Then it is good to rely on the poet to lean on.

AMOUR

I discovered Simon Johannin through my favorite Toulouse bookstore Terra Nova. They recommended his novel " L'été des charognes ". It was a real shock, I was engulfed in the text, its ferocity, its rhythm, its almost documentary atmosphere. As I read the book, I imagined the author to be in his fifties perhaps smoking a pipe in his office under the roof of a beautiful Parisian building looking back at his rural and distant youth. Then I found out that Simon was 13 years younger than me, had a shaved head, and lived in the concrete towers of suburban Paris. But also that we were both born in the Tarn, a region in south of France. I was immediately intrigued. I had the idea to contact him and ask for a text I could adapt in a song. I sent him the music of what was to become "Amour" and he accepted. I was expecting something wild, hard, and lo and behold, he came back to me with a stunningly sweet dreamlike love story. It was a total surprise, a new facet of his writing that I was discovering. Simon never ceased to amaze me. The text clicked with my vaguely dub rhythm, the melody came to me right away, it was actually already in his words, I just had to reveal it.