THE NEW LOU DOILLON

Portrait

Since her début six years ago, the sparkling Lou Doillon has unveiled different facets of her personality on each new album, every time proving that she is a songwriter of exceptional talent. On her third opus, Soliloquy, she reveals an exuberant audaciousness far from the intimate folk of previous recordings, a more constructed sound developed with three producers.

More than six years after her first

album, Places, Lou Doillon has managed to carve out a very special place for herself in the French music scene. Initially dismissed by the music industry as a mere model, actress and “daughter of,” she conquered her audience through her radiant naturalness, her heady voice and her feline, supple song-writing. From I.C.U., her fiery first track on her first album, to Burn, which opens her new one, things have remained incandescent, and Doillon is still the warm-hearted singer who has got us through many a dismal winter with her welcoming, enveloping, easy- going style. After her exploration of the cold Canadian winter on 2015’s Lay Low, her second album, she’s now back in sizzling form with Soliloquy, a disc that is solitary in its title alone. The product of a fertile dialogue with several producers – Benjamin Lebeau of The Shoes, Dan Levy of The DO and Nicolas Subréchicot – this audacious multimood album sees her leaving the comfort of guitar folk and compact pop for more adventurous terrain, without, however, losing anything of her idiosyncrasy as an author, composer and co-producer of enormous talent. Like her half sister Charlotte Gainsbourg or her soul sister Cat Power (who makes a guest appearance on the ghostly It’s you), she proves that intimacy isn’t necessarily a question of navel gazing, but on the contrary can be a way of giving, and that soliloquies can speak to us all. As for speaking with Lou, it’s always an enormous pleasure, every time.

NUMÉRO: What made you want to explore this idea of soliloquy? LOU DOILLON:

What I liked most about it was that it implies a form of theatricality. I was happy to get away from the intimate, even if in a soliloquy you’re talking to yourself, because it’s a form you find a lot in classical theatre. There’s also the idea of the choir, as found in Greek tragedy, and as it happens I used choirs a lot on this disc, particularly on the track with Cat Power, where her voice is positioned like the female choirs in antique tragedies. I wanted to find a certain distance that would allow me to free myself up a bit more.

Are you one of those people who talks to herself out loud when she’s alone?

Yes, I talk to myself a lot. Like old or slightly crazy people, I sometimes talk out loud to myself in the street. Rudeness, for example, can set off a long monologue. [Laughs.] Some guy comes speeding past in his car in a street where there’s a school, as is the case where I live, and I’m off…

Is song- writing a conversation with oneself?

Most of the time, yes. Even if I don’t start out from a personal point of view, I inevitably come back to one at a certain moment, and conversely if I talk too much about myself I get away from that af ter a couple of verses. Because of my family history, the idea of intimacy is difficult to negotiate, because it could easily end up being a bit tabloid press. So I try to cloud the issue, and in doing so end up writing things that completely elude me, and that’s the bit I like.

Is singing in English a sort of veil for you?

I’m French, and French is my everyday language. But I’ve always very naturally sung in English, and when I’ve found myself in difficult family or relationship situations, English has tended to come out. There’s a simplicity to English which makes the text immediately take off, whereas French seems more complicated to handle. I always pay a lot of attention to what I say in French – no doubt the result of having been thrust into the spotlight very early on – and for me it remains the language of politeness. I find English more liberating.

Your sister Charlotte managed to sing in French on her last album while still tackling intimate themes…

What’s surprising and beautiful in Charlotte is her paradox of being both very fragile and very strong. You just have to look at her film career to see that she takes crazy risks. From both her mother’s and her father’s side she’s clearly inherited the risk-taking gene. The fact that she now lives outside France perhaps helped her to write in this very frank and direct way – she probably wouldn’t have written like that if she were still living here. And, as I said earlier, in our family the intimate isn’t really all that intimate, for her even less than for me, so at a particular moment she was able to find the strength to do it, and I think she was right.

The musical colour of your new album is very dif ferent from its predecessors. Was it time to explore new perspectives?

The danger is being tempted to do the same thing over again. For me there’s less danger in renewal and above all in having fun. I could never recapture the innocence I had on the first album; on the second I needed something sort of animal, a bit wild, and I couldn’t go any further in that vein, unless I did a voice- guitar album. I thought about it at one point, but decided I could always do that later, and I wanted to enjoy myself in going as far as possible from where

people expected to find me. On Lay Low, I was obsessed with the idea of “truth,” and wanted the album to be like a live recording of a show. On the new one I’ve gone much more towards the production side of things, without worrying about how the songs will be adapted for live performance. And with Benjamin Lebeau of The Shoes I certainly got what I was looking for! Rehearsing the songs for the stage, I realize how much he put down on the tracks – strange, chemical things that are difficult to define.

You spoke about a theatrical side to the album – is that something you’d like to bring out on stage?

I’d love to, even if I probably wouldn’t have the self- assurance of a PJ Harvey, who manages to put on a super- theatrical show, where she wears incredible feather hats, all the while conveying a very powerful political message. But within my capabilities I’d like to share with young people who come to see me something of the 70s and 80s rock that fascinated me when I was a teenager, with extravagance that you don’t see anymore. I’ve always recognized myself in the Spinal Tap side of the rock concert, or in the very “drama” stagings of some the artists back then. Apart from Björk or Nick Cave, nobody does that today. For the first live radio per formance of the album, I came in a lamé dress. Everyone took the piss out of me, but I didn’t give a damn. There was an audience, my father was there, and in any case I did it for myself more than anyone else. It was the first time I sang in a dress, with high heels, and for me that’s already an enormous step.

You’ve become a professional singer. Does that surprise you, given that initially you didn’t even want people to hear your songs?

I’ll always be an “amateur,” because I like the word in its literal sense, the idea of things done with love, but I don’t want to be seen as a little fragile thing, given that that’s not me at all. I don’t want people to hold my hand, and that was Étienne Daho’s greatest gift when he produced my first album: at first he took me by the hand, but at a certain moment he dropped it. When I was 12 or 13, a period I tried to forget about for a long time, I used to climb on top of the piano to sing, in totally over-the-top dresses – I was very extravert. A childhood friend reminded me about it recently, whereas my memory was of being a teenager who used to hide in the bathroom to sing. But the pre- adolescent, who is much more like who I am today, had been obscured from my memory. This year I’m working with Gucci again, and that’s something I think they could see in me. I have this fringe-and- cigarette image, but that’s just because it kind of goes with the times.

Were the dif ficult times you’ve gone through these past few years also a reason for being more light- hearted?

Yes I think so. Totally. I’ve spent a lot of time in the hospital with people I’m very close to, there have been a lot of deaths and dramas, all of which made me feel it was time I took a deep breath and learned to live in a better way, before it was my turn.

Did the success of your fi rst album encourage you in this?

Without that success I would probably never have made another disc, and I don’t know if I’d still be here today. At the time, when it became known that I was making music, people in the business were more than sceptical. Everyone was hostile, I started out with an enormous handicap, and it was the public who got the ball rolling. A Disque d’or the first week after the album’s release, the Victoires de la Musique six months later, all that was because the public was touched by my songs. Even now, every day, I run into people in the street who tell me exactly what effect a particular song had on them.

Do you think your music career literally saved your life?

Yes, because before that I was finished, burnt out, in an industry that lets you know it. I started doing songs when nothing else was working, when there wasn’t a single casting offer on the horizon, no apparent future. The success of that first album saved me personally, professionally and financially at a time when I had already played my last card. I made the album precisely because I had nothing left to lose. Today I’m recognized for my music and also for my drawings, and it’s an accolade I’m proud of, because when I look at my teenage diaries there are drawings and song lyrics. I feel like I’ve gone all the way round on a roller coaster and have come back to where I always wanted to be.

Lou Doillon, Soliloquy ( Barclay/ Universal), out now.