Always in search of truth and depth after more than 30 years of career, Arthur H will launch Friday The lifea 17e album in which he celebrates… life.
“I have a bit of a liability to settle, slips Arthur H with a smile. My previous record was called Early death of a popular singer in the prime of life, which is a pretty morbid title. So life asked me personally to restore the balance! »
The freest of French singer-songwriters speaks to us by videoconference from La Rochelle, where he is doing a residency to put on his new show. This “disc-film” is a crossing, but above all a celebration of life, he explains, “with all its immense paradoxes, its tensions, its inconsistencies, its unimaginable complexity”.
“Initially, I was not satisfied with the title, I found it too simple and general. Then at one point, I saw it as a life drive. This need to celebrate life in a luminous sense, versus the death drive, which today affects us and affects society. I thought there was a choice to be made to be on the side of life. »
The life is a call to seize the moment – “ What you have to live/Live it “, he sings in the very beautiful The road –, an encouragement to free ourselves from our chains, voluntary and involuntary, to see the beautiful as the less beautiful and to transcend it. “When you try to cultivate an immoderate love of life, everything is usable, transformable. » And everything becomes matter for history if one has « the luck or the bad luck to be an artist ».
The power of words, Arthur H believes “very strongly”. “For 15 years, I have realized that stories, poetry, can transform us in a concrete way. »
The lyrics of the songs were written in collaboration with his lover, the visual artist Léonore Mercier, who pushed him to his limits, he says. “She had a ruthless eye for what she saw as weaknesses. So that there is not a word that does not serve the story. »
Abandonment
Whether inspired by a Russian tale or his friendship with the iconoclast Brigitte Fontaine – a tightrope walker of song, like him –, a musician from the titanic who plays “on the edge of the precipice” or a love crisis, Arthur H follows the thread of life to death and everything in between. His quest is metaphysical, yes, but he is more interested in how to concretely convey emotions than in finding answers.
We are in a metaphysical bath, whether we like it or not! We can live in perpetual distraction. But this is not satisfactory.
Arthur H
We do not know much about the meaning of our passage on Earth, emphasizes Arthur H. But as long as “to be in this incredible process, sometimes completely painful, sometimes extremely joyful”, it is better to celebrate this movement.
Music is the perfect vehicle, this “impalpable food” intended “for the heart, the mind and the stomach”. “But for it to nourish, there has to be something spontaneous, free, fluid. Otherwise, it is a product. Junk food. »
With its depth and multiple musical layers, The life is the opposite of a fast album. There are musicians from jazz, harp and clarinet, string arrangements, strange and vaporous instruments – Ondes Martenots and Cristal Baschet – which give the whole an airy and mysterious aura.
Everything was mixed in Montreal by his friend Jean Massicotte, because the musician needed the special atmosphere of this city he loves so much. “There is an approach to sound that is not the same as in France, another way of listening. When I’m in Montreal, something in me relaxes inside. »
In this “sound forest”, where one can enter and “possibly get lost a little”, the singer, for his part, abandons himself as rarely. “Yes, it’s a quest I have. To abandon me. To be inside the sound. To make very fluid music. It’s a star, something that attracts me. In the best of cases, we come close to it, I hope in any case to have come close to it on this record. »
For more than 30 years, Arthur H has been exploring and researching. It continues on its way without bending to the mainstream, and this long 12-song concept album is a form of resistance to the speed of the times.
Music is a journey, and a journey takes time. For time to expand, it must exist.
Arthur H
Arthur H will come to present his show in Montreal next summer, but without all the coating that surrounds it, even if it “breaks his heart”, because the travel costs have become too high. He wants his album to be “a magical object that can, for a moment, transform the places where we listen to it”.
“I wish him a great journey in all possible spaces and hearts. »
The life
Arthur H
naive
Available February 17