Mon dieu! Opened up Sunday’s magazine and... Benjamin Biolay is the new darling at the Times. Being married to Chiara and her evocative and amazing lineage doesn't hurt either. Makes good copy. Last week Keren Ann felt the love, now this – Is this new French Revolution? Next week Carla Bruni. I smell it. Like ripe camembert. But all this at once - its too much! I've been a huge admirer of Biolay since the beginning, going back to the brilliant Rose Kennedy, have posted a lot about him here, and I'm glad to see him get recognition in the Times and find an audience in the US. His talent as a songwriter, arranger, and producer is astounding - and he is amazingly prolific! Lil' sis Coralie Clement just got her new album dropped in the US a few weeks ago which Biolay produced.
Preview tracks from the new Benjamin Biolay album, A L'origine, here.
Related press (LA Times), also text version of NYT feature, after the jump:
4 French musicians rack up gains in U.S.
It's more vibe than lyrics that pleases fans
Music that's popular in France doesn't often translate to American audiences, which is why the weepy ballads, overproduced Europop and French-fried hip-hop that dominate the radio there infrequently land anywhere in the United States other than record-store import bins.
French musicians who do make a name for themselves here are usually underappreciated in their home country - artistically respected but commercially missing the mark, the French equivalent of American indie rock. But what doesn't work in France may click with Americans, especially those with a taste for '60s-style chansons.
Over the next few months, several Parisian artists are releasing records here. Together they form a sort of retro French foursome, with Keren Ann channeling the guitar-centric romanticism of Francoise Hardy, Coralie Clement acting as sexed-up soprano Jane Birkin, Benjamin Biolay a newfangled Serge Gainsbourg and Carla Bruni, the superbabe turned singer a la Brigitte Bardot.
Keren Ann hot in U.S.
Of the four, Bruni is the most commercially successful back home, but Keren Ann is probably best known in the United States, thanks to a small fan base built around "Not Going Anywhere," her first English-language album, released last summer by Blue Note affiliate Metro Blue. Keren Ann's soft, lyrical delivery and gently cascading orchestration are easy to fall in love with.
The 31-year-old singer-songwriter just released another gorgeous collection of hushed, unhurried melodies. Sung in French and English, "Nolita" is further evidence of Keren Ann's gift for channeling mood into song and her predilection for romantic tragedy.
Layering airy vocals and horns over maudlin strings, her music casts a spell.
Keren Ann is based in Paris, but "Nolita" takes its name from the New York City neighborhood where she spent much of last year writing it: North of Little Italy. The release of "Not Going Anywhere" had brought Keren Ann to New York to perform and promote the record. She spent her remaining time writing.
"Who doesn't want to spend time in New York? Who doesn't want to spend time in Paris?" Keren Ann asked rhetorically, smoking a cigarette in a recent interview. "They're perfect for people who like to isolate and write and make their own calm environment while knowing that outside is a big city."
They're also great for people with a cosmopolitan upbringing. Keren Ann is not French ethnically. Born in Israel to a Russian-Polish father and Dutch-Indonesian mother, her full name is Keren Ann Zeidel.
She moved to Paris with her family when she was 11.
Hooked on the sound
It was Keren Ann's first time in France, but it was not her first experience with French music. That came much earlier and through her mother, who often played albums by Hardy and Gainsbourg. In their '60s heyday, Hardy was known as the French Bob Dylan, and Gainsbourg a seductive, melodic cad. You can hear traces of both in Keren Ann's music.
"I think the first attachment was for the sound, because I couldn't understand the language," said Keren Ann, who speaks Dutch and Hebrew in addition to French and English. "Francoise Hardy always said she searched for a British sound, and that's why her music is different, so it's a mixture of the French chansons, or way of writing, but it's the production that was really appealing to me."
Like Hardy's, Keren Ann's music transcends language. Whether her lyrics are in French or English doesn't matter as much as the feel.
"Sometimes you don't even need to know what they're saying. The mood and vibe is so joyous and fun," said Nettwerk Productions' Mark Jowett, referring to Keren Ann, Biolay and Clement.
Keren Ann is leading a bit of a French invasion. Her new album will be followed with releases from two Nettwerk artists licensed through EMI France: Clement's "Bye Bye Beaute" and "A l'Origine," by Clement's brother, Biolay, a critics' darling who's been widely hailed as the vanguard of a new movement in France.
Of the two, Biolay is a greater talent, but he may prove less accessible to American audiences. His vocals are rich, his production dense, his lyrics grounded in emotional truth.
Musically, he is Gainsbourg, Phil Spector and John Lennon rolled into one - visionary, if busy and referentially complex. The opening track of "A
l'Origine," for example, ends with a swirling, Beatles-esque "A Day in the Life" disintegration. It isn't the most welcoming opener to the intricately orchestrated rock that rounds out the record, but it is indicative of his strongest influence - '60s English pop.
In France, Biolay and Keren Ann are almost invariably linked. But their fame pales in comparison with supermodel-turned-singer Bruni, who scored a massive 2003 hit with her debut record, "Quelqu'un M'a Dit." It has sold 1.5 million copies in France alone.
It's testimony to the record's strength that Bruni has sold 50,000 copies in the U.S., almost exclusively the result of in-store play at Barnes & Noble, which has distribution rights, and word of mouth. Sung in French, the record is as easy on the ears as its singer is on the eyes.
Lyrics unimportant
Built around a pair of guitars - one strummy, the other a slide - the arrangements are simple. Bruni's vocals tend to crack or blank out when she travels toward the upper register, but there's a tenderness, almost as if she were singing to a child or lover.
What she and today's other Parisian chanteuses are singing about, only French speakers know, but it doesn't seem to matter.
"As much as we seem to be down on France these days, American audiences really like their French female singers. The language is obviously a very pretty language," said V2 Records' Dan Cohen. "It's one of those things with world music albums. If they're melodic, people react to it. They don't necessarily care what the lyrics are."
March 27, 2005 Le Pop Star By BENOIT DENIZET-LEWIS enjamin Biolay sat, shoulders hunched, in a smoky, cluttered recording studio on the outskirts of Paris. He had just returned from a month's vacation with his wife, Chiara Mastroianni (daughter of the cinematic titans Catherine Deneuve and Marcello Mastroianni), at Deneuve's country house in Normandy. He should have appeared refreshed, but instead he looked as if he had spent the month in this windowless room, chain-smoking cigarettes and contemplating the cruelty of life. The French, after all, can seem mean and aloof when they're really just feeling shy, and Biolay is no exception. He knows that he can come off as con, meaning ''jerk'' or ''jerklike'' -- the French conveniently use the word as a noun and an adjective -- when he doesn't intend to. But Biolay makes the look work. With his wavy brown hair, soulful brown eyes and sensual pout, he strikes many who meet him as painfully handsome. In this way, he couldn't be less like the man he has been compared with a lot lately: Serge Gainsbourg, the big-eared, baggy-eyed, perpetually hungover hero of French pop. As the 78-year-old chanteuse and former Gainsbourg collaborator Juliette Gréco put it: ''Benjamin is beautiful. Serge was not.'' Nonetheless, Gainsbourg did manage to revolutionize the French music scene in the 1960's, taking chanson -- the song style of Edith Piaf -- and turning it into something innovative and daring. Thirty years later, Biolay has done much the same thing, with four albums in as many years -- ''Rose Kennedy,'' ''Négatif,'' ''Home'' and, out next week, ''À L'Origine'' -- that rethink French song through just about every other musical genre. Like Gainsbourg before him, Biolay styles himself as more than just a singer -- he's also a songwriter, producer and composer. The similarities don't end there. Both men had musician fathers who trained them in classical music. Both married actresses with whom they then recorded albums. And both wrote songs for others before figuring out they could sing them just as well themselves. Music critics can't help forging supernatural links between the two, claiming that Biolay is channeling Gainsbourg and ''comes on like Serge Gainsbourg reincarnated.'' But for his part, Biolay has had enough of all the Gainsbourg talk. ''It gets tiring,'' he said, strumming a guitar and looking appropriately fatigued during a break from producing his sister Coralie Clément's second album. (A song from her first, ''Salle des Pas Perdus'' [''Room of Missteps''] was part of the soundtrack for the Jack Nicholson-Diane Keaton romantic comedy, ''Something's Gotta Give.'') ''One day a journalist asked me which French singer I really admired,'' Biolay continued. ''I felt pressure to come up with a name, so I said Gainsbourg. Ever since, I've been 'the next Serge Gainsbourg.' But I don't really even think I sound like him. And he was a very sad man. He was immature, very childlike in many ways. Complained a lot. And he didn't have any success until his 40's.'' In fact, the 32-year-old Biolay would just as soon not be compared with any French singers at all. ''As a kid,'' he said, ''I really didn't like most of them. The ones I did respect, like Gainsbourg, sounded more American to me than French. You could tell they didn't listen to much French music.'' As Biolay sees it, he's not really making French music. He doesn't even like French music. France loves its auteurs (both Biolay and Gainsbourg can lay claim to the title), but not even the French can be counted on to love French pop music. Over the last two decades, the French music scene has drawn heavily on whatever it could bring in from outside: the African rhythms of Senegal's Youssou N' Dour and Mali's Salif Keita, the D.J. remixes that blended world beat with house and Euro-pop. The band Air collaborated with the 60's sweetheart Francoise Hardy and played with the synthesizer sounds of 70's rockers like Jean-Michel Jarre but then overlaid them with Pink Floyd-inspired psychedelia and ambient lounge. And Phoenix and Tahiti 80 began making effervescent, American-inflected pop that garnered cult followings in the United States. Only recently have a handful of young singer-songwriters (Biolay among them, though he prefers not to be lumped in with the pack) started looking back to chanson itself. The songs tend toward the melodic, celebrating everyday moments and humiliations with a light sense of irony: stealing your girlfriend's handbag (''I have it. I succeeded. I proceed with the autopsy of this loyal animal, which follows her around like a little dog'') or the charms of small flaws (''Ta dyslexie est si sexy'' [''Your dyslexia is so sexy''], croons one singer). In its world-weary ennui, the music is distinct from Gainsbourg's brashly sexual double-entendres and Hardy's little-girl-lost melodies, but it is indisputably chanson. Of the new generation, Biolay and his former partner, the Israeli-born Keren Ann, who just released a new album, ''Nolita,'' have had the most critical success in the United States. Ann could easily pass for the auburn-haired reincarnation of Hardy (with whom, incidentally, Biolay sings a duet on the coming ''À L'Origine''). Ann sings in French and English and regularly appears at Joe's Pub in New York City. Biolay produced and helped write all the songs on her well-received first album, ''La Biographie De Luka Philipsen.'' Its best-known song, ''Jardin d'Hiver'' (''Winter Garden''), a hit in France, was originally written for the jazz crooner Henri Salvador, who was a star in the 1930's. ''I've always admired Henri for writing very pretty and jazzy songs, so we sent it to him, hoping he would sing it,'' Biolay told me. ''He took so long to get back to us, we just decided to have Keren sing it. Then Henri called and said, 'J'adore!' So both of them ended up singing it on their albums.'' Salvador's ''Chambre Avec Vue'' (''Room With a View'') sold more than one million copies in Europe and includes four songs written and composed by Biolay and Ann. The album's success got them noticed, and in 2001 Biolay's debut solo album, ''Rose Kennedy,'' a musical homage to the Kennedy saga, earned rave reviews. Biolay followed it in 2003 with the darker but equally poetic ''Négatif'' (Beck is said to have had tracks from the album on his iPod) and then the dreamy ''Home,'' on which he sings with Mastroianni. Recouped by a generation attuned to the retro groove of lounge, chanson is sexy again, at once deliciously French but not too French. Carla Bruni, the model and an ex-girlfriend of Mick Jagger, released her first album of French pop, ''Quelqu'un M'a Dit'' (''Someone Told Me''), late last year (it sold one million copies in France). The latest album from Joel Virgel, who is from Guadeloupe, included a version of Gainsbourg's ''Chanson de Slogan,'' with Virgel singing the female part in one of the pop icon's more playful duets. At the same time, early stars of chanson like Gréco and Salvador have resurfaced, releasing their first albums of new material in years, with lyrics by the same young French songwriters who were influenced by them in the first place. There has also been a flurry of releases commemorating the genre's heavyweights: Edith Piaf, Jacques Brel and, as always, Gainsbourg. Last month, ''Great Jewish Music: Serge Gainsbourg'' was rereleased with the Gainsbourg songs covered by groups like the Japanese hip-hop-influenced pop duo Cibo Matto and the self-consciously indie New York band Elysian Fields. Maybe Biolay is right: neither he, nor anyone else, is really making just French music. ver dinner at an outdoor table in the Fifth Arrondissement in Paris, as I tried to get Biolay to talk about chanson, he played with a pack of cigarettes with ''FUMER TUE'' (''SMOKING KILLS'') emblazoned in big black letters on the front, eyed an attractive brunette who meandered past our table and finally steered the conversation toward two of his obsessions: American history and politics. He has a closetful of books about the Kennedys. He had also just finished reading Bill Clinton's autobiography, ''My Life,'' which, he joked, was just as long in French. Lighting a cigarette (he says he wants to quit and is considering hypnosis), he talked about making ''Home.'' As Biolay tells it, he and Mastroianni conceived of the album on a drive to The Hague. Dissatisfied with the CD's they'd brought, they decided to produce a better road-trip soundtrack when they returned to Paris. Mostly, ''Home'' is a sun-drenched album of folk-inflected, lo-fi duets, perfect for cruising through the Arizona desert. Only two songs are sung in English (''She's My Baby'' and ''A Home Is Not a Home''), but there are plenty of lyrics that need only partial translations, like ''Fume un peu de weed.'' To Biolay's annoyance, it didn't take long for critics to claim that he had found in Mastroianni his Jane Birkin. It was with Birkin, the whispery-voiced British actress who became his wife, that Gainsbourg released the scandalous (and scandalously successful) 1969 duet ''Je T'Aime Moi Non Plus.'' The song was an instant underground hit (the BBC banned it, and the Vatican denounced it). For those who knew French, the salacious lyrics made clear what Birkin's moaning did only too well on its own. Biolay says he's not interested in scandalizing anyone, but he does have a way of turning the women in his life into musical sensations, much as Gainsbourg did for Birkin and Brigitte Bardot. Before Mastroianni worked with Biolay on ''Négatif'' (she joined him for a couple of tracks) and then on ''Home,'' her singing was relegated to the shower. Mastroianni is better known as an actress with supporting roles in offbeat films like Robert Altman's ''Prêt-à-Porter'' (in which she appeared with her father) or Delphine Gleize's ''Carnage,'' an ensemble piece about unrelated characters connected by the remains of a bull. Then there's Biolay's younger sister, Coralie Clément, who also never expected to be a singer. Clément was hanging out with Biolay a few years ago when he asked her to sing a song he had written. ''I needed a girl to sing the lyrics just to see how it sounded, and she was there,'' Biolay said. ''So she sings, and she was good, but I didn't think much of it. When I sent the song to my distributor, they loved it, and they said that whatever I did, I should use the woman on the demo. So that's how it started. It happened by accident. It's not like I'm trying to turn every woman I care about into a singer.'' Of course, that's what Biolay would say. His style is to coolly avoid the big statement, to seem hounded when anyone tries to pin him down. The first time I saw him smile -- in the recording studio, after he made a gay joke -- I furiously scribbled ''Biolay Smiled!'' in my notepad. ''Oh, that was just a joke,'' Biolay's manager, Laurent Manganas, told me, probably worried that I was writing that Biolay is homophobic. (Which, incidentally, he's not.) As we finished our meal, a short man wearing a straw hat and wielding a guitar approached the outdoor tables and broke into a spirited rendition of ''La Javanaise,'' a classic Gainsbourg love song. ''He's killing the song,'' Biolay told me as the old man sang off-key. Finally, as we got up to leave, Biolay gently put a few euros in the man's coat pocket. It seemed a strange choice, considering that he was butchering a French classic. ''If enough people give him money,'' Biolay explained as we left, ''then maybe he'll stop singing.'' Benjamin Biolay was born on Jan. 20, 1973, in Villefranche-sur-Saone, a small manufacturing town near Lyon in east central France. His father, a clarinetist in the local orchestra, encouraged him and his two sisters to play instruments. ''My parents basically forced me to play the violin,'' Biolay said. ''Eventually I realized that I actually really liked it, and then that I was good at it.'' At 15, Biolay was accepted to the prestigious Lyon conservatory of music and moved into an apartment with other young musicians, learning to play the trombone and winning two of the school's top awards. But his classical phase didn't last long -- soon he was watching a lot of MTV and teaching himself to play the guitar. In 1994, Biolay and the band he had formed, Mateo Gallion, released a live album. Hardly anyone noticed. He then went off on his own, writing and recording his own songs, but nothing caught on. ''I was really unhappy in my early and mid-20's,'' he told me, ''but a lot of what I wrote was really happy. It's like I was trying to make myself feel better. Apart from drugs and sex, which I did all the time, there wasn't much more that interested me. I was the kind of guy who would have a girlfriend and then three girls on the side. I was pretty transparent, though. I wasn't pretending to be anything other than what I was.'' That, he maintains, is still the case. So I tried again to get him to talk about chanson. Did he really want to be on the record saying he doesn't like most French music? (I pictured irate, Gainsbourg-loving Frenchmen overturning Citroëns outside Biolay's apartment, demanding that he apologize or move to America.) Biolay shrugged. ''Some are O.K., really, but I'd much rather listen to the Beatles than to Gainsbourg,'' he said. And as much as Biolay wants to cast off the great man's shadow, his refusal to be lumped in with other chansonniers isn't just a pose. ''Benjamin's music is more subtle, more layered and less French-sounding,'' said Christophe Conte, a writer for the French music magazine Les Inrockuptibles. ''Benjamin really doesn't belong in the same category, but he's lumped in there because a lot of what he writes for other people has a more classic chanson sound to it.'' Much of modern chanson is playful, ironic and downright perky. Biolay's music is often dark and moody. On his second album, ''Négatif,'' which moves from acoustic ballads to country rock to pocket symphonies and electronica, Biolay sings about suicide, nightmares and furtive back-room sex: ''I love your bitter skin, your silky skin in an iron glove. I like going into the wall, to each his own, glory hole, glory hole . . . Nothing but a dog's life, in the back rooms and basements. Glory hole, glory hole.'' Obsessed as he is with America, Biolay couldn't resist a post-9/11 song on ''Home'': ''Are you still afraid of the dark? Who do you see in the mirror? Have you had your hour of glory? What will history make of you?'' Biolay's coming release, ''À L'Origine,'' is his first foray into a real rock sound, although it still features his trademark beautiful ballads and a children's choir on four tracks. ''Benjamin is a poet,'' Juliette Gréco told me. ''His writing, his music, it's very serious, very meaningful. It's beautiful, elegant and haunting.'' Kind of like the man himself? Gréco laughed. ''Yes, exactly.'' Biolay and Mastroianni live in a big, sunny Parisian apartment littered with children's toys, CD's and books about music, culture, art and politics. ''Ignore the mess,'' Biolay said, lighting a cigarette as we sat down at the big table in the spacious living room, while his 2-year-old daughter, Anna, stumbled around, banging an empty Evian bottle on anything that might make a funny sound. ''For the last month she's been running around with the sheep at Grandmother's'' -- Deneuve's -- ''country house, so this apartment isn't really containing her,'' Biolay said. ''She's like, 'Where are the sheep?''' Biolay also has a stepson, Milo, an outgoing 8-year-old, from a previous relationship of Mastroianni's. Milo seemed excited when I was visiting, because once I left Biolay was going to take him bowling. I didn't realize that people bowled in Paris. ''Oh, yes, we love bowling,'' Biolay said. Was Mastroianni going, too? ''Oh, no, bowling is just for the boys,'' Biolay said, smiling at Milo. Mastroianni, who wore jeans and a T-shirt and hadn't said much since I came over, concurred. ''Yes, bowling is definitely for the boys,'' she said. Mastroianni has mostly avoided the attention of the paparazzi, who tormented her parents when she was a child. The couple say they do as few interviews as possible, although they did pose for the cover of French Elle to promote ''Home.'' ''When people want to interview us, it's rarely about our work,'' Biolay told me, rolling cigarettes for Mastroianni and himself. ''Journalists won't let Chiara be her own person -- they want to write about her in relation to her parents. And they always want to make us out to be this glamorous couple.'' Biolay so dislikes being in the limelight that he doesn't even like playing live -- or at least not that much. ''He's very shy, and for a long time he didn't feel comfortable in front of a lot of people,'' Mastroianni told me. ''But now he's starting to like it. It's growing on him.'' Celebrity is also growing on him. While Biolay insists that he looks at his feet when cute girls in the subway recognize him and stare, I don't believe it. During our time together, Biolay -- in typical French male fashion -- tried to make eye contact with almost every attractive woman who walked past us on the street. ''It's really funny,'' he said as he walked me from his apartment to a cabstand. ''The moment I start to get famous, I get married. So the moment I could have sex with any girl I want, I can't.'' I gave him a poor-you look. ''Yes, I know, I have it rough,'' he said. ''But Chiara really is all I want. I'm terribly in love.'' As in love as Gainsbourg was with Birkin? Biolay smiled, said nothing and kept walking. Benoit Denizet-Lewis, a contributing writer, last wrote about fraternities. He is beginning work on a book about addiction in America.
hello-
Thanks for your website-- it is very informative! I have recently discovered Benjamin Biolay's songwriting on the COralie Clement cd "Salle des pas perdus." I love both the his songs and her performance. I am wondering how to get the lyrics in Englisn as ma francais est tres mauvais.
Any leads?
Thanks--
Geri Mahood
Chico, California
Posted by: geri mahood | September 12, 2005 at 12:52 AM