A sixth album and a tour for Olivia Ruiz: “I’m waiting for the turning point”

Every day, a personality invites itself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Monday March 4, 2024: author, composer and performer Olivia Ruiz. She has just released a new album, “La Réplique”, and will be on tour from April.

Olivia Ruiz is a multidisciplinary and free artist. In turn author, composer, performer, actress, director and even novelist, we discovered her in the first season of the show “Star Academy”. This is his second album The Chocolate Woman, released in 2005, which will reveal it to the general public with no less than 1.2 million copies sold. Writing is part of her with the songs, but also with her novels The chest of drawers with colored drawers (JC Lattès) or Listen to the rain falling (JC Lattès). After seven years without new titles, she is back with Replyan album of 13 songs that talks about her, her view of the world.

franceinfo: The song, Replywho gave the title to the album says: “I am one of those who swim against the tide, who refuse the direction of the wind“. Is it an ode to freedom?

Olivia Ruiz: Yes, to trying to resemble oneself above all, rather than trying to resemble this image of the perfect woman that people want to serve us. When you are 44 years old and you see very young girls who you find so pretty, I was going to say, get damaged, yes, because what could be a nice tool has excesses, it’s true that I’m touched. I tell myself, it was not necessary to want to correspond to something which ultimately is anything but reality and which precisely moves away from the beauty of reality.

Every time you come up with something, there’s a duality. Duality is being free and at the same time living as a couple. There is this emotion and this need to share, ultimately. You are like that.

“I only see life through sharing.”

Olivia Ruiz

at franceinfo

Friendship is truly something that is necessary, for example, more than any other form of love. This is really where I find my balance and where I am fulfilled and where I can also fulfill.

When you arrived at the “Star Academy”, you were already completely different. Many said to themselves: “But what is she doing there?”

Yes, but I also wondered that at one point!

Yet you have become an emblem of this show.

I don’t know, I don’t have that perspective yet, strangely. Yet it’s still been more than 20 years. I’m just starting to realize that I’m stronger than I thought. I always see myself as a fearful person, who lacks courage. And it’s true that it’s now that I’m starting to say to myself: I was still bloated whereas at the time I felt very fragile.

“When I sing ‘La Réplique’, sometimes I tell myself that it’s a little bit of me, but above all it’s the one I aspire to be and that I’m only just scratching the surface, perhaps.”

Olivia Ruiz

at franceinfo

We understand that Reply comes at the right time, that this album is also a sort of “take-up” of the way you look at the world. You dance is a song that talks about femicide and pays tribute to one of them. Is it important for you to position yourself, to reach out?

These are almost not choices, they are in fact necessary. When you are a woman and you read on the networks everything that you are lucky enough to be able to read thanks to women who do investigative work, like Andréa Bescond, like #NousToutes, it hits you in the flesh. We have no choice but to talk about this. So I want to pay tribute, in this case to Sarah Barukh, who is a woman who escaped femicide and saved her baby. It was this person who had the idea of Collection 125 and the association 125 which goes with it to pay tribute. We often talk about the executioners and we forget the victims a little. Thanks to these interviews and the investigative work she carried out to find the relatives of the 125 victims of that year, many things can change.

You sing in French, in Spanish. You have paternal and maternal grandparents who fled Francoism. Is it ingrained in you?

For a long time, I felt a little illegitimate. I told myself: if I make a huge Spanish mistake in a text, I’m going to look like I’m worthless. And in fact, today, I say to myself: what matters to me? It is to continue to carry this duty of memory, to forge a form of resilience by proxy that they were not able to achieve. What is important for me today, and that is why I am taking possession of Spanish, is to pay homage to those who made me through this, to the migrants. Since then, I have decided that the problem of embarrassment and fear of making mistakes no longer needs to be an issue.

Your tour begins on April 4. You are eagerly awaited. People have been waiting for you for seven years.

That, I don’t know. Me, I’m expecting the turning point in any case because it’s going to be something to regain the energy. On all tours, in any case, it’s always very physically intense moments and I admit that I’m a little nervous while being desperately excited at the idea of ​​returning to the dark rooms in an energy different from Stitched Mouths.

Watch this interview on video: