In the details of our lives as in the great magma of the universe, each of the small elements that pulse has an impact on the others. Singer-songwriter Fanny Bloom likes this holistic approach to things, even though this way of seeing the world soothed her at a turbulent moment in her career. The singer also shows herself to be multiple and complete on her fourth career album, aptly named Holistic.
No surprise then that it is the title track which opens the new album of the woman who became a mother in the middle of a pandemic. Here are two emotionally charged events, independently of each other, which came together in a single earthquake. The shock was powerful, disturbing, confronting. The very handsome man was surrounded by great fears, including the very real fear of dying and thus abandoning his offspring.
Fanny Bloom needed a step back, a new perspective, and this word that fascinated her, “holistic”, guided her. “It calmed me down to tell myself that deep down we are part of this great whole that is life, space, the earth, the little things and the big things,” she explains without changing too much. esoteric. We are part of “this kind of great whirlwind” while being a whirlwind ourselves.
Fanny Bloom sings “I am the universe / And you are the stars that travel through me / You are space / And I am time that runs its course”. And if we look at these 10 new songs, they somehow meet this principle. We find the pianist as a constellation of interrelated emotions.
Holistic features, for example, the mother, the lover, the friend, the musician; It’s Fanny Bloom, that’s it. “It’s all my little pieces put together, but also my letting go with lots of things, like a kind of serenity that settles in quietly, which feels good, then makes things less serious. Then that’s the fun. »
What Fanny Bloom didn’t want to do was a maternity album. In front of us, she shakes her head “no” several times, even though she cherishes her “tornado” of three years. “It’s in the album, it’s important to me,” she explains. Becoming a parent — and my child himself — fuels my inspiration, but I wouldn’t be tempted to listen to an album where it’s just that. […] I also want to eventually be able to show him that we realize ourselves in many ways and that we exist outside of this role. [de parent] “.
This new album, which appears five years later Liqueur, is also a pandemic in the sense that musicians like Fanny Bloom had to stop everything or almost everything, and then restart the machine from cold. On Han han like before and on Your beating heart in particular, the singer evokes troubled areas in relation to her profession, to creation, to the return to normal when nothing was normal anymore.
“I quietly reopened the tap, then I said: well, we’ll see,” admits Fanny Bloom. But I was a little scared, I said to myself: what will it be like? Will I still be able to write? I had fundamental doubts. The first song I wrote was rubbish, it really wasn’t good. I made my boyfriend hear it, then I saw it in his eyes! But [je me suis dit] let’s calmly get back on the horse, let’s give ourselves the chance, it’s been two intense years, we’re going to anchor ourselves somewhere. »
Piano and… disco
The record is therefore imbued with these experiences, this notion of balance, of light and darkness, of dance and cozy cocoon, of beach and apartment. And musically too, Holistic feeds on two energies. There is the sweetness of ballads, of which The sky looks like you about his son, and the passion of the pop songs, much more… rhythmic?
“There, you mean disco, let’s not be afraid of words! » laughs Fanny Bloom, her eyelids covered in glitter and her teeth set with sparkling stones. Yes, disco. We can almost see the ball on the ceiling and the flashy clothes. Above all, we hear the string arrangements of Vincent Legault which plunge us head first into the era.
“I like it!” she says. If I could have made an album just disco, I would have, but my piano I can never really chase too much. Even if I try, it seems like he’s coming back. » Nevertheless, Fanny Bloom did not shy away from her pleasure, and the strings recording session was a great moment for her.
One of his main inspirations for the musical style was the record Heart by the Frenchwoman Clara Luciani, to whom we owe the success The grenade, taken from his previous album. “ Heart, it’s an album that I listened to a lot, particularly the arrangements. What makes me like it so much? I kind of studied it, then I made Thomas listen to it a lot! », his life and music partner, Thomas Hébert.
Holistic ends however on an acoustic note, very “Bon Iver”, with a dry piano-trumpet-guitar version of To die for, a piece that Fanny Bloom had prepared for a Radio-Canada project around Colocs. The radio show aborted at the last minute due to a dispute over the authorship of unreleased songs, the rights to which were ultimately transferred to Guy Lapointe, a former roommate of Dédé Fortin. Once the dust settled, Fanny Bloom decided to repatriate her version on her own record.
Regardless of its author, “the song, I love it. I don’t know what the life of this song will be, but it does me a lot of good.” Like the record in general, it revolves around three verbs: sing, dance, love. Everything is in everything.