(Paris) Youn Sun Nah has finally decided, at the age of 50, to take a step, that of writing: after ten albums spent reinventing the compositions of others, this South Korean singer always on the edge of emotion reveals in waking world his own moods.
Posted at 9:20 a.m.
“I experienced COVID-19 as a possible end, so I told myself that I had to dare to do things, but since we could hardly do anything during this period, I only had the challenge left. to write music,” Youn Sun Nah, who is currently on tour in France, told AFP.
On her previous albums, the singer slipped a few compositions of her own, between covers of songs by Randy Newman, Joni Mitchell, Jimy Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Paul Simon or Marvin Gaye.
On waking worldshe signed all the songs, lyrics, music and arrangements.
His “Waking World” is populated by ghosts. The pen of an artist who began by studying literature before branching off to learning composition, improvisation and jazz, is soaked in an ocean of melancholy, loneliness, disenchantment, with a few islands of appeasement.
“This is perhaps the reason why I have hardly written any texts in recent years, I did not want to show these torments that inhabit me”, says You Sun Nah. “But am I more tormented than another person? “.
The texts of a singer who lived cut off from the world and her friends for 18 months in South Korea evoke the poor existence of a bird neither flying nor singing, the collapse of the world, loneliness, a heartache, with communion with nature as the only refuge.
They are all written in English. However, the artist is Francophile and masters the French language after having spent a good part of his time in France since the discovery of this country in 1990, at the age of twenty.
“More independent”
“I dream of writing in French, it’s a goal. But it’s also an Everest”, confides the one who has already interpreted on stage or on disc With time by Léo Ferré or Without you by Michel Legrand.
To dress up his disenchanted ballads, he needed music to match. Guitars, electronic keyboard sounds, celestial trumpets, baroque strings, echoing choirs, on rock rhythms, sometimes funk-soul, respond and overlap in rich sound textures, carrying his bewitching song.
“In the past, when I had ideas for arrangements I relied on the musicians in the studio to explore and realize them. Most of the time, I just gave them ideas, directions and we worked them together. The software allowed me to be more independent, to go further in the preparation of my models,” she confides.
“While I was alone, I was able to write precisely what I had in mind and ultimately very elaborate models. »
The electro-pop tone of the record takes it a little further away from jazz and the more improvised and stripped down aspect of its past productions.
“The songs on the album are very well written, that’s for sure”, confesses its author, who admits having spent a lot more time in the studio for the recording of her last two discs than during the older ones.
The improviser Youn Sun Nah, able to magnetize an audience with the sole spectrum of her voice, simply accompanied by an accordion or a kalimba (a kind of pocket xylophone from Central Africa), would she be no more than a memory? ?
Not quite. “I don’t think my personality has changed, and my kalimba still accompanies me everywhere”, confides the singer who, after her tour in France, will travel to Switzerland, North America, Germany…