VIDEO. Christophe Willem and the failure of his album “Rio”

“The first week of sales is a bit fateful. And it’s true that it’s super violent when one week of sales, you are told: ‘Well, well, the album, it’s folded. It doesn’t hit the numbers, so it’s dead.” Christophe Willem did not expect such a failure for the sales of his album Rioreleased in 2017.”I had the feeling that, all of a sudden, everything that was given to me, it was taken from me in a snap.”, he explains.

The singer felt this disappointment from a very personal point of view. “What is very violent is that when you’re an artist, it’s very difficult to dissociate what you do from what you are. I often say that, when you go to a bakery, you get a baguette that’s a bit toasted, (…) you say: ‘Well, in a misunderstanding, someone was on the phone at this that time, she messed up the wand.’ But it’s not dramatic. (…) So dissociating what you do from what you are, when you’re an artist, it’s all the same very complicated, and at the same time, it’s fundamental, and in both directions, in case of failure and in case of success.”

“This led to a whole bunch of questions about: but why was I doing this job? What did I need to fill? Was I doing this job out of ego? Was I trying to communicate emotions with people? Well, you see, all these questions, they needed to be dug deep and that’s what I did, in fact, as soon as the tour stopped. So it was intense, but necessary”, recalls Christophe Willem.