Lyon (AFP)

Three years after "Now", Vincent Delerm returns with a new album and a first film in which he unfolds his musical universe. An extra step for this all-round artist who delicately continues to refine a course "without calculations".

"For a long time, I stopped myself from going out of the song, and then, the first time I stepped aside [in 2011, for the theatrical and musical show" Memory "], people did it well received ", says the singer, musician and photographer of 43 years, met Sunday in Lyon at the Lumière festival.

"It was for me like a permission, and now I'm more interested in the energies that I feel, even if my core remains the song."

In "Panorama", his seventh album that will be released on Friday, this late chronicler continues his exploration of a melancholic universe inspired by the memories and emotions of everyday life.

An intimate approach "to make laugh or move", which he made his trademark but become more musically refined and orchestrated, far from the stripped piano-voice duo of his debut.

"The starting point is each time very personal sensations My belief has always been to tell intimate things to allow me to find an echo," says Vincent Delerm.

"Musically, the albums are good places to make new proposals, I've also evolved in my singing, but I'm still faithful to the piano in concert."

- Introspective travel -

The arrival in the bins of this new record, where the cinema occupies a place of choice, will be accompanied by the release Sunday in Paris of "I do not know if it is everyone", a stylized medium length that the singer looped while recording "Panorama".

Vincent Delerm summons before the camera the memories of a handful of loved ones, recognized artists or perfect strangers, from whom he went to collect the "tremors, the vibrations", dressed in musical arrangements of his composition.

During this introspective trip, faithful to the atmosphere of his songs, the spectator meets his accomplice of always Alain Souchon, the humorist Vincent Dedienne, but also the late Jean Rochefort, for what constitutes his last and very moving apparition to the 'screen.

"More than my world, I wanted to stay true to life and to make relatives testify about something that matters to them and makes an impact," he says about this project initiated in 2015, which was originally supposed to be a fiction.

Since "Fanny Ardant et moi" (2002), the remixed piano-voice piece that has revealed its music and its nonchalant voice to the general public, this discerning cinema-goer never stopped evoking the magic of the 7th Art at the through his songs.

"The movies are trains in the night," he sings, citing a famous replica of "The American Night" by François Truffaut, on the very melodic "Panorama", the eponymous song of an album in which he also pays tribute to the filmmaker Agnès Varda.

To give "Panorama" "a strong identity, a color", the singer entrusted the realization of each of the ten titles of this new album to different artists, including Peter von Poehl, Keren Ann, Yael Naim or Rufus Wainwright , with whom he sings in duet the sublime "The pale children".

Vincent Delerm will begin on October 22 a big tour in France whose first Parisian dates are already full.

© 2019 AFP