One would have thought that at almost 70 years old, after many hardships and a lot of difficulties overcome, Renaud would be ready for a well-deserved retirement… but not at all: the “edgy singer” returns this Friday with a new opus of covers of French chanson standards. With his voice hoarse from the abuse of alcohol and cigarettes, the singer recounts all the texts differently, giving them poetry and an unprecedented nostalgia.
Nostalgia, melancholy, these are two traits that have inhabited Renaud for a long time. The singer is aware of this, as he confided in the columns of the newspaper The Parisien this Friday, May 6, 2022: the depression he has experienced several times is still watching him today. And in particular through anxieties about her two children, Lolita, 41, and Malone, soon to be 16. A “stress” of “the loss of childhood“, of “the anxiety of aging” and of “do not see grow [s]are children” who pushes him into smoking excessively, knowing that it greatly damages his voice.
But no longer in alcohol: sober for a year and a half, the singer no longer intends to sink. For his children, precisely, of whom he is very close. “My daughter Lolita is a real woman at 41“, he says. “Malone, who will be 16 on July 14, is back to the piano, he plays ‘Mistral Gagnant’, I would love to record with him one day“. The young man, very discreet, lives an adolescence far from photographers but seems however to forge deep links with his dad, he who had rather badly experienced the successive descents into hell of the singer.
This is why he is now looking for where this melancholy can come from, to finally, perhaps, get rid of it. “I did several therapies to understand where my melancholy comes from. I am in psychotherapy at the moment, the shrink is very friendly, but she has not yet managed to find. Neither did my friends. But do not worry“, he reassures.
In the meantime, we will find Lolita by his side on May 10, during a special broadcast on France 2: on the eve of the singer’s 70th birthday, many personalities will come to pay tribute to him by performing his most beautiful songs.