“Do you think this album is depressing? », asks Zazie, who we find on the terrace of her favorite café in the 20th arrondissement. We tell him that no, that’s not the impression that Volatil, his twelfth studio opus, which comes out on October 2, gave us. If the subjects addressed in certain songs, from the violence of the world to Alzheimer's disease, are serious and sensitive, most of the orchestrations, often rock, pop or electro, create a contrast that encourages you to sway your hips. This is what she advocates in A Prescription, the piece that opens the record: “So that our hearts don’t cry, they have to dance, so that fear doesn’t lead the dance”…
Your disillusioned and questioning look at the world and its violence persists in this album. Twenty years ago, you sang “I was there”. Would you write the same song today?
I think I could unfortunately write exactly the same. It started from something more intimate but, at the time, the idea of looking at the world like an impressionist was already there. I wondered: are we doing enough to combat what is going wrong? Not too much. Not enough. Today I am less angry with myself about this. I come from a Judeo-Christian world, quite polite, where there are good causes, etc. I participate in lots of things, at Restos du coeur, at Amref [an African public health NGO]… We always want to do better, but I would be a little less defeatist about “I haven’t done anything”. If the songs I write do someone good, that’s already not bad and useful to society. I do that, it’s not all, but it’s not nothing.
“It’s always the same story, that I repeat again…” you sing. Years go by and nothing changes?
I find that the little story, like the big one, repeats itself. I have my recurrences of neuroses or themes that I like, but humanity is a bit looped in something quite anxiety-provoking.
In previous interviews, you told me that you had difficulty imposing “Je suis un homme” or “Cyclo” as singles with your record company. Did you also have to struggle on this album?
My record company told me that there were a lot of songs that could be released as second singles, but they couldn't decide which song to release first. I sulked for two days, then I said Whatever. Fifteen days later, I delivered it to them and they found it very good. But we didn't fight that much. I make sure to mix songs like The Same Story with pieces that are more “formatted” for radio, that is to say, less than three minutes long. I prefer to self-publish rather than have the song slashed by the radio, which happened to me at the time with Larsen and it completely traumatized me. There was a cut going from “deaf” to “we are getting feedback”, which means nothing. There, I wanted The Same Story to come out, with a clip, to show the more austere aspect of the album. This song is too long to go on the radio and I had no intention of cutting any verses. So we make it exist like that.
In “Zazie. A”, you are talking about artificial intelligence. Does she worry you?
I talk about generative AI. When we make music, we use software that is really interesting, but it's us who generate it. [Christophe] Willem, on his networks, asked an AI to design a song in his way and it released a piece with his voice. The face he makes while listening to it is hilarious. But we still have, thank God, a little margin because music is made of accidents, reliefs, faults... Which the AI does not foresee. And then this song is a reflection on concerned networks. I am very wary of it.
That's to say ?
They can be a wonderful tool for communicating. When the music video for The Same Story came out, I went to read the comments to see if people were happy or not. I was reassured but there were also “She’s hit”, “What did she do to her hair?” ". It's crazy. I am 62 years old, I come from a generation where we could say what we thought but we thought about what we said before. There, there are people who are angry, frustrated, envious, jealous, and who let go. I find it quite sad, because it's not real life at all. Most do it anonymously, it’s distressing.
The choice to keep your hair gray has actually been widely commented on. You mention it in a song..
For the photos in the album, the photographer sent me the images offering me 15% retouching, 20%, 30%... Systematically, I took the first one. I'm sure I want to take on something, even if it means having to think about it. If people say, “Oh my, she’s old,” that’s fair. Well yes, I'm of a certain age, it's not a bad word.
One of your songs is called “La Nostalgie”. Is this an emotion you experience regularly?
Not so much. I can certainly say “It was better before” but because I am part of a generation who experienced adolescence without cell phones, without the Internet. However, I was one of the first artists to create a site because I found it interesting, so I am not against evolution. For this song, I started from a very intimate story, about how to grow old. I'm rather melancholy. Melancholy is a tenderness exercised towards oneself. I would rather be sad than anxious. Nostalgia is looking into the past, telling ourselves that we no longer experience good things. The song says that, in Alzheimer's, there is perhaps a deliberate part, a desire to forget what we see or what we no longer experience.
Do you agree if I say that this song, which talks about your mother, is the most intimate in your repertoire?
There were much more intimate songs. Like I don't know who was talking about something that had happened to me with a lover at the time. For La Nostalgie, I started from what was happening in my family, but not only that. The mother I describe is not entirely mine. Mine is happy, she is losing her mind, she is 93 years old, she is in great shape, she runs in the street...
You sing there, “nostalgia, mom, it’s when fear leads the dance”, like an echo of the words of “A Prescription”…
At first, I had a laugh and slipped in lots of little references from one song to another. Say the same thing, but in a different place. I took some off because people might think I'm doing my job badly. I still kept a few, saying the opposite of what I said before. That’s also what’s great about creation. On Monday, you can say one thing and on Tuesday, exactly the opposite. We don't always have the same thoughts on the same subject. We are not always in the same state. This album is six months of writing, a year of work. I don't have too much cash but there are also a few songs that I collected and wrote a long time ago.
Like for example?
Where life goes. Or Naïve, which is a song that I wrote twenty years ago for a singer whose tone was very high. She didn't take it from me. I left this song aside and regularly people who had heard it asked me for it. Often singers, because it is still a bit technical. But it didn't happen. So I thought I'd try, lowering it a little. It’s still my keyboard from twenty years ago. We added strings and I updated the text so that it suited me.
“There’s no more season” is one of the album’s highlights. It leads on false trails. We think it's about climate change but its real subject is the influence, violence against women...
I wondered how to talk about this topic. I admit that the Pelicot affair struck me in many places, both in terms of the courage of this woman and the horror of what she experienced. How do I make one more song about that? Je t’accuse by Suzane, for example, is a very beautiful song, which addresses what these women experienced. I haven't experienced that. I have obviously experienced small slaloms where we mess up a bit and get attacked, but not to this extent. I told myself that I was going to go through nature to arrive at the unnatural. For many of these women who speak out about domestic violence, there was a landslide that they did not see coming. They find themselves in a situation where they either leave or die. What interested me was this very atmospheric, very meteorological side of a toxic relationship. Because that’s what happens before we talk about it in the news.
You spoke in the spring about the Patrick Bruel affair, saying that there is no smoke without fire. There have been other accusations since. He canceled his tour. Was that the decision to make, in your opinion?
First, to put the church back in the middle of the village, I started by saying that I did not witness any action of this kind. Otherwise, he would have heard me well before and I would have talked about it. Patrick Bruel is a great seducer, he is not the only one. But when there are so many women saying something, you have to listen to them. Justice will take care of this. In the same way that he decided quite quickly not to be part of the Restos du coeur so as not to endanger Les Enfoirés, I think that, to calm things down, he was right to make this decision. Afterwards, I am not necessarily for, if we take the example of a Gérard Depardieu, saying that we are going to remove all the cinematography of the man because he is a bastard. Otherwise, we remove Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Richard Wagner, etc. I think we need to take the time to calm down to let justice happen. What you also have to understand is that it’s a decision that is necessarily complicated because there are seventy people eating thanks to a tour like that.
At the end of August you took part in the solidarity concert in Bordeaux for the victims of the fires…
I was in Greece when I saw what was happening in France. I thought of Pascal [Obispo] who lives in the South-West. I asked him if he was okay and he told me that he was cooking food for thirty gendarmes who had just set up a post to organize the infrastructure... And then I saw the images, it was atrocious. At the same time, there was momentum from the people on site. In this horror, there is this beautiful reaction of solidarity, because it had to be, there was no choice. When Pascal talked to me about doing a concert, I replied that if it was televised, it had to be national, that we had to evoke the Gironde but also the Landes, the Var...
We were betting on 500,000 euros raised. Between ticketing, merchandising, donations, we have exceeded 2 million… It’s not going to be enough. This means that each affected person will have less than 1,000 euros from us. But it is important to tell them that we have not forgotten them. Because I think that the worst for these people is what they experienced but also what will happen to them now, if everyone forgets them.
“So that our hearts do not cry, they must dance”… At this solidarity concert, your “order” was respected…
It was incredible. People danced. I have rarely seen this. The Enfoirés audience is extraordinary because it participates, but it’s a big, well-oiled machine. There, the public welcomed the singularity of each artist with tenderness. Jeanne Mas, David and Jonathan, Axel Bauer, me… In the dressing room, I was with Jeanne Mas and Natasha St-Pier. We have nothing to do with each other, but it was delicious.
That evening, everyone agreed, including the somewhat strong personalities. There was something stronger than us. Egos were put in the locker room. There was a little state of grace because we and the audience knew why we were there.
