- Natasha St-Pier is releasing her new album Croire this Friday August 14th. It will be composed of poems by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, texts by Mother Teresa and homage to the Virgin Mary.
- This album will be the singer's third spiritual opus after Thérèse , Vivre d'amour (2013) and Thérèse de Lisieux, To love is to give everything (2018)
- A record around "love, self-giving, generosity, emotions of the heart" addressed by Natasha St-Pier for 20 Minutes
“To entertain people but with an extra soul. Natasha St-Pier extends her profession of faith with the release of the album Croire this Friday - on the eve of August 15 . After two spiritual opuses To live in love and To love is to give everything, the singer honors Saint Thérèse of Lisieux and also pays homage to the Virgin Mary and to Mother Teresa.
She will soon defend these new songs in a tour of churches in France, Belgium and Switzerland - nearly a hundred dates are announced. This Thursday, the singer performs, in front of a small and masked assembly, at the sanctuary of Our Lady of Lourdes as part of the National Pilgrimage and the Assumption. "For the release of an album that talks about the Virgin Mary, meeting in Lourdes is one of the best places you could dream of", confides Natasha St-Pier to 20 Minutes.
What motivated you to once again invest in the spiritual register?
I feel like what I'm saying speaks to people. I manage to do my job, that of entertaining but with an extra soul. It's very nice to feel like you're speaking to the audience in depth.
How has the public experienced this change in your career?
Those who found themselves in the songs continue to follow me, the others may go to something else. This is also music: an artist accompanies us at some point in our life, some relationships last, others are shorter. You can't make music in order to retain an audience, that would be thinking that people are not evolving.
Why did you particularly choose texts by Thérèse de Lisieux?
It was Grégoire who suggested that I make Vivre d'Amour, my first spiritual album [released in 2013] composed of the poems of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. I let myself embark on this project without knowing what I was going to find there. Thérèse's vision pleases me very much. In this new album, I perpetuate this very Teresian way of thinking around love, giving of oneself, generosity, these emotions of the heart. In a very competitive world, it is pleasant to take the time to stop and tell yourself that what you are doing is good, that you have done your best. Finally, I discover a place in which I feel good and in which I want to continue to evolve.
Thérèse, Mother Teresa, Marie… Your inspirations are essentially feminine, how do you explain that?
Women are indeed the common thread of this album. Between my mother, mother Teresa, me, what we are talking about is the capacity for self-sacrifice, resilience, and love of women. Very maternal qualities in fact. In fact, I am for the equality of the sexes but I find that by wanting to go towards this equality, we also switch to a masculinization of women. Me, I do not want to transform the woman, I think that these feminine qualities make her strength and that, ultimately, we are complementary.
Why did you choose nuns as mentors?
Mother Teresa is a nun but I chose her because she evoked motherhood, without being a mother in the biological sense. I thought it might speak to all those women who have this maternal fiber in them but don't have children. I am talking about my mom, who is not a nun. I speak of myself as a mother and I am not a nun either. I am also talking about Mary: if we want to find an icon of the mother, the one capable of accepting everything without aggression, without rebelling in the quintessence of these qualities I was talking about earlier, we think of Mary. These women, I find them inspiring and that is why I propose them.
You were talking about self-sacrifice, resilience. It seems that you have had a certain awareness in your journey via, in particular, this change of register, is this the case?
It is mostly chance. If Grégoire hadn't come to see me for the first album, I don't know where I would be today. Simply, I felt in harmony with myself. The fact of being able to combine my popular singer side and spirituality, which is at the heart of my daily life, to make these two characters a single entity, I found that very pleasant.
You speak of spirituality to be distinguished from religion, what is the difference according to you?
There are several religions. A religion is a codified system. Religious are spiritual people who will believe in different gods but in similar values. Today, people no longer have spirituality because whoever says "secular state" means "non-religious state". However, “non-religious” does not mean without spirituality. What people lack like this is that touch of humanity. It is this amalgamation that bothers me: it creates people who think essentially about earthly, immediate things, short-term happiness, which ultimately do not anchor us. And, I have the impression that the word religion puts us in boxes while that of "spirituality" does not.
“Boxes…”, do you think we can assume Catholicism in today's music and media landscape?
It depends on how you do it. If my goal was to evangelize people then, yes, I would put myself in a box. I prefer to offer something that calms me down, ways of thinking that come from religious figures. Therefore, I cling more to what they did than to what they are within the Catholic Church. That's what I like to offer: a spirituality, a faith, a belief in a god, in oneself, whatever. The important thing is to realize that we are not essentially beings of flesh and blood, that we have a conscience and to try to nourish this other dimension.
The album is called "Believe". You, what do you believe deeply?
In many things! I believe in myself, in the medicine that saved my son [born with a heart defect, he had to undergo an operation at the age of 4 months], in a God, in my family. I believe in the future of Man, in his ability to renew and surpass himself. I want to believe in the future. For me, faith is quite close to hope: it is believing in something without any certainty. Hope is also to think that something will happen without being convinced of it. Faith is hope.
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