The singer-songwriter Caracol will take advantage of the Coup de cœur francophone festival, which starts this Thursday, to launch Everything is different, a pop album that borrows from reggae, soul and, more than ever, hip-hop.
Already in 2018, the 11 pieces of Symbolism embraced – with the … English language – the possibilities of beatmaking. Rapper Illa J, future soul duo Abakos and DJ Toast Dawg, among others, have made their mark.
A year later, it was a chance encounter in the backstage of the Francos that would consolidate the electronic turn of Caracol, discovered solo in 2008 with the very folk The perfume tree.
After her performance on the main stage of the festival, on June 15, 2019, the multi-instrumentalist started talking about music with QuietMike, rhythm designer of rapper FouKi. “We’re both big fans of reggae, and he has a contemporary freshness in the way he creates beats,” remarks Carole Facal, whose real name is her.
This “immediate connection”, two years later, was transposed on Everything is different. QuietMike applied its urban and summer filter on half of the tracks, while Seb Ruban, Caracol’s accomplice since day 1, co-produced the entire album. “A mixture of freshness and continuity,” notes the musician.
Two energies
With this fifth album created during the pandemic, the singer wanted to counterbalance the ambient gloom. “For me, too, it was a lifeline. I needed to get out of it, to write light, positive things that focused on a good groove. ”
This is evidenced by rhythmic pieces with a strong taste for escape. This time, the voices and rhymes of Mike Clay, Ragers, KNLO and Eli Rose are put to use. Writing “light and good” is not an easy task, specifies the lyricist, who lends her bilingual pen to other performers.
How do you do something simple, beautiful, effective, without being cheesy? It’s quite a challenge, and I wanted to take it on.
Caracol
The fact remains that the confinement and the suffering of certain relatives led Caracol to explore less funny situations, such as the break-up (Everything is different), mourning (Pupil) and absence (Play dead). “There are really two energies on the album. A more melancholy emotion accounts for events experienced personally or around me during the pandemic. ”
For the first time since White Wednesday, published ten years ago, Caracol has chosen to versify his states of mind in French. When writing in one language or another, the polyglot explains that she is guided by her “first idea”: “a keyword, a phrase, a yogurt”.
“During the pandemic, I was in a cocoon at home, in Montreal, with my family,” says Caracol, born of a Swiss mother and a Uruguayan father. I think that’s what brought me to a more French-speaking inspiration. ”
It is in French that Caracol became known in Quebec, within the world-inspired duo DobaCaracol. In the mid-2000s, the album Soley as well as the simple ones Strange and Salty kiss have pranced at the top of the charts.
The separation of the group in 2008 was experienced hard. It is only today that Caracol says to have “made peace with all that”.
“It’s been a long journey. The adventure had ended badly. Today, I am proud of what we accomplished with this group. I recreated my links with Doriane [Doba]. We had lost sight of each other. We have turned the page on this and we have no regrets. Everyone has found their way. ”
Carole Facal says she knew she was fully “healed” when listening to a cover ofStrange signed Omaleya. “I left crying. I thought it was so good and I thought, ‘Ayoye, you wrote that song.’ I had always denied that part of my creativity. ”
But now, in 2021, everything is different …
Everything is different (Kartel Musik), available from November 5
Launch show at the Ministère on November 8 at 8 p.m.
Visit the Caracol website