Catching up to who CHRIS IS
France’s Héloïse Letissier is earning raves for her bold new look and confident new album
It’s far preferable for an artist to have attained mainstream success by letting the mainstream find them than to have explicitly courted the mainstream.
Even then, you’re caught in a strange artistic position. Do you follow your id and keep your fingers crossed that the quirks that brought you such unexpected fame and fortune don’t drive the broader public away if pursued to an emboldened “next level,” or do you obsess over further cultivating the quirks that got you this far in the first place?
Héloïse Letissier, the “Christine” behind the multi-faceted French synth-pop project known as Christine and the Queens, went with her id.
Christine and the Queens’ 2014 sleeper, Chaleur Humaine, was remarkably subtle, smart and slow-to-grow for a hit 21st-century pop record, which is undoubtedly why it took two years for it and the sneaky, snaky single “Tilted” to properly filter out of France and turn its English-language reissue into the biggest-selling debut album of 2016 on the U.K. charts.
The masses came to Christine and the Queens, not the other way around. So Letissier — who’s kept things subtle, smart and slow-togrow again on this fall’s deftly sculpted followup, Chris — trusted in herself to do right the second time around by being even more herself. Or, to put it more accurately, even more Christine. She buffed up, she chopped off her hair and she embraced her pansexual nature with unprecedented authority. She became … Chris.
“There were certain things that happened — instincts and then you shape them into the pop form of an album — but the idea to evolve into Chris was just, at first, something really natural,” says Letissier, 30, calling from backstage before Christine and the Queens’ performance of “Comme si” on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert last week. “People were calling me Chris more and more and I didn’t want to shield myself, and I wanted to work on something more exposed and bare and even more personal if I could, and the idea of Chris as a nickname to express that started to be really appealing to me.
“Even the physical evolution was just something that happened over some years of touring. My body changed and my relationship to my body changed, also. It was a kind of newfound eroticism. I was performing every night and I was onstage every night, and I was basically in control of a body in some form of abandon because when you sing and offer songs that you’ve written there is really something to the idea of ‘letting go.’ It’s both control and surrender and, I think, it just made me think of eroticism way more and I think I got a bit more confident to experiment with that.”
Letissier likes to use the metaphor of the Trojan horse in relation to her music, as behind her ’80s-dappled pop melodies lie a lot of deeply personal lyrics — presented in both French and English once again on Chris, depending upon the version you choose — about the sometimes rocky road to reckoning with her queer identity. You don’t have to dig any deeper than the appealing veneer, but there’s a lot to process if you do.
Ironically, Letissier has found that she got so big so fast at home that it’s only now that people are catching up to who Chris is.
“The queer sensitivity of my project is sometimes more un- derstood in the U.K. or the U.S., I think,” she says.
“I mean, I’m not experiencing all the different layers of America myself. I’m in, like, New York and L.A. and I’m speaking to people who are educated and really get it. But in France it feels like the queer element of my project sometimes was not even perceived. I got to a point where I was really mainstream and the songs were on the radio and I think people knew me, but it was interesting because I was a Trojan horse who was not discovered.”
On the new album, she says, “it’s more blatant and, actually in France, it got a bit more divided because people, I think, understood better all the layers of the project. There were more reactions to that and it was interesting to witness.”
Not that Letissier was terribly worried about potential reactions while she was recording Chris. Indeed, although there were some tentative sessions with Mark Ronson and Damon Albarn along the way, in the end she retreated to her basement and did all the writing and most of the production by herself. The only high-profile name in the credits is American funk maestro Dam-Funk, who contributes a little extra sexiness to the lead single, “Girlfriend.” Otherwise, it’s all Chris, all the time.
“I was discovering the studio process on the first album and I think I was a bit scared to take it upon myself to think of myself as a real producer,” says Letissier. “So it was really satisfying. And also it kind of took out the pressure.”
Reaction to Chris has been effusive. It ranks among the bestreviewed albums of the year to date on Metacritic with an 89 score out of 100. The current North American tour — which, as usual, focuses as much on the choreography dreamed up by Letissier and French dance collective La Horde — is selling briskly, too. The Christine and the Queens stop at the Danforth Music Hall in Toronto on Monday sold out a long time ago. Nevertheless, Letissier isn’t lying awake nights worrying whether or not she has another chart-topper on her hands.
“It feels like people are into it for the right reasons for now,” she says.