Alex Beaupain's melancholy
Alex Beaupain © Vincent Desailly
29/10/2019
Three years after Far , the fetish singer of the filmmaker Christophe Honoré returns with a new record, No more the day than the night . Ten tracks that speak of love, but also, for the first time, the state of the world. Strong and fair titles, which confirm the place of Beaupain to the rank of masters of the song.
Alex Beaupain speaks at 200 per hour, as if the words were jostling in him, in an urgency to say. He specifies, jumps from one idea to another, loses the wire to always find it. One of the most precise and precious songwriters of our time, a sensitive painter of love, has just made a new album, whose title looks like insomnia: No more day than night. An aphorism completed by the song that gives it its name - " No more day than night, I can not rest or peace . " Because what drives Alex, in his intimate stories or in the affairs of the world, remains this state of permanent worry. A fuel for his creations: "I try to write about horrible situations, with the most beautiful words, the most accurate words."
In this, the fetish singer of filmmaker Christophe Honoré has not changed. He continues to ask about the torments of our souls, about our wanderings and our love tears, the strongest words, the wildest words: those that make us feel special and universal, those that strengthen us and console us.
In no more the day than the night , it thus offers a handful of songs of love of beautiful bill, of which it has the secret. It describes the separation in All the opposite of you , and the games of sensual bodies, that come to strike the love in early Si or Diastème ... For the rest, Beaupain made clean slate.
And the singer quote one of his fans, François Hollande: " Change is now!" . After the joke, he develops: " I listened to my last record, Far , and I told myself that it was a repetition of the previous one.Therefore, I wanted to operate, while remaining myself, some metamorphoses" .
Oblique strategies
To do this, Beaupain borrowed some sort of "oblique strategies", as invented by Brian Eno. [The musician had designed a card game with "rules of the game" to unleash his creativity: "turn a melodic element into a rhythmic element", "Fill every beat with something", "What would your best friend do?"]. To get rid of his habits, Beaupain has entrusted the musical realization to two young artists: Sage, aka Ambroise Willaume (Woodkid, Clara Luciani); and Superpoze, aka Gabriel Legeleux (Lomepal). So he wanted the tandem to take his creations away from his automatisms, far from the string arrangements used and abused by singers of variety.
And here are the songs of Alex Beaupain dressed in delicate and subtle electro-pop colors, which leave all the space to his voice to blossom: a clear song, which arises with a frank simplicity, a luminous naturalness. And then, he jostled his way of proceeding. Rather than compose the entire record, before closing in the studio, this time, Beaupain went back and forth each week for a year, with the duet: a work in progress , which allowed to unify the ten nuggets that make up the disc. Especially, the singer has set this rule: " stop turning around my belly button to tell the state of the world, hang on to what I knew less to do."
Thus, in No more the day than the night , it sings, once is not custom, the abandoned illusions of the old sixty-eightards ( Comrade Course ), the terrorist attacks, painted with metaphors shot in the Sirens , the shooting from Orlando ( Orlando ) ... " These plagues have attacked my gang, all the people around me: women, terrace strollers, artists, homosexuals, for me it was horror bingo! ", says Alex Beaupain.
In Doussière lente , he also tackles the end of the world, that of civilization, against a backdrop of climate change. " Of course, this idea infuses everything, each of our actions ... And I can not, decently, no longer content to write my little sentimental songs by pretending to ignore the drama to come," he says.
" A song is useless"
For the singer, if this record is not the most autobiographical, it is nevertheless the most "personal". " I allowed him to bloom freely, to my natural inclination, without straining, " he said , " so I did not feel compelled to make happy or tonic songs, I opened the floodgates of my melancholy, that feeling I love it so much, I love dark, desperate songs ... "
Fortunately, the record, on Doussière lente , ends with this note of hope: " And yet, we are moving forward ." Is it the grace of songs, which would come to save part of the world? Alex laughs, and repeats it a good dozen times: " A song, it is useless" . So, of course, it's hard to believe. Because the second after, he describes with passion this art which enchants and animates him: " It is useless at all, but it has been very useful to me, it has made my life wonderful. This art is very serious, that's what matters most to me, Barbara, it was my mother, the lullaby that helped me to fall asleep ... There is no form of creation that upsets me so much and so profoundly, with this immediacy of emotion. "
As a result, Alex works tirelessly to create his jewelry in the manner of a craftsman of sounds, words, melodies - "J'en chie, c'est taf, I have no manufacturing secrets" , laughs -t it. And assuredly he places himself master in this popular art of exigency. " Unlike any novelist or philosopher, who has several hundred pages to explain a love story, song writers have only three minutes to type in millet." So, of course, the songs are "useless". We can also smile at this assertion and say that they sublimate life, and that they charm the world with their lightness as much as their depth. Those of Baupain act like this - balms in the heart.
Alex Beaupain No more day than night (Polydor) 2019
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