Every day, a personality invites herself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Today, the multidisciplinary artist, actor, writer and singer, Bernie Bonvoisin. Friday, June 9, 2023, he released a new solo album entitled: “Amo and Odi”.
Bernie Bonvoisin is a multidisciplinary artist, actor, writer, screenwriter, director and singer. He distinguished himself and was recognized with the French rock group Trust and the famous title Antisocial (1980). The themes addressed within this group are the excesses of democracy, the capitalist system, the gray areas, the extreme right, sects, the violence of Soviet communism. In short, when we say Bernie Bonvoisin, we obviously think first and foremost of his cash and provocative side. He released his new solo album on Friday June 9, entitled: Amo and Odi.
franceinfo: Your new album Amo and Odi includes 13 songs. Each corresponds to an emotion, to a feeling. For the first time, you agree to tell your story, limit putting yourself in danger. Why today?
Bernie Bonvoisin: It’s something progressive. The approach, each time, is to be both in a universe of music which is the music I listen to and then in writing, to find a different writing, to take risks.
Isn’t that precisely what made this project different, even if it’s the fifth album, which gave you such confidence that you agreed to drop the armor a little anyway?
Yeah, it’s getting back to things we love like George Harrison’s 12-string acoustic guitars, that sort of thing!
Piano-voice too, we discover you for the first time.
I had never done that. David did the song. Really, when he made me listen, my first reaction was to tell him: since all my lifeI’m waiting for something like this!
The starting point in all this life remains poetry.
It’s both the possibility of trying to do things in a different way and, in the meantime, of enriching yourself with reading, with things you see. There is a kind of mixing when you create things.
“I always try to harmonize what I think with what I do.”
Bernie Bonvoisinat franceinfo
Sometimes I manage to harmonize everything, sometimes I don’t manage it so well, other times not at all. In any case, there is a sort of goal.
Writing also allows you to tell your life, your childhood, to tell your story. It also allows you to denounce, to defend what suits you or what is important to us. First of all, is it a way to get things done? What’s the idea? Is it to provoke debate?
Yes, it means that at least there is a debate, a consultation, an exchange. Not what we are witnessing today, where there is no longer any listening, that is what is terrifying. Things can be built and done. There are plenty of things that are built just by the fact that there are people who have this approach to things.
We have the impression of discovering you as a child in this album. Did you feel the same while writing the lyrics?
Yes, there are things and experiences that put you on the floor.
“The writing on a project like ‘Amo and Odi’ has to be as close to the skin as possible.”
Bernie Bonvoisinat franceinfo
I would like us to talk about your parents because they are very present in this album. Now gone, they had an unconditional love for each other. It is very important for you and you offer them this piano-voice title: To open your veins. We are on edge, he brings tears to his eyes. Tell us about this song.
It wasn’t easy. I am lucky to have been raised by very loving parents who loved each other like crazy. They lived 62 years together. I went to their wedding, I was 17. My mother had a form of Alzheimer’s in the last five years of her life. Me, I have more of an Eastern mentality for these things, that is to say that the elders, we keep them with us. And then, I very quickly understood that it was unplayable. So it had to be placed. And when she was placed, my father returned to a refusal to live. But totally. The guy took five years to leave and I went with him. So I tried at the start to bring it back to reasoned and reasonable things. But he said to me:Listen, I have 80 years, you are not going to break them for me“. So it was his choice and he went all the way.
Do we grow up with this?
Yes. It makes you realize that the people we have close to us and who are dear to us and whom we love, it is very vital to tell them.
With this album, even if you evoke your and your past lives, because there have been several, you anchor yourself in the present. Are you turned towards the present with in the distance, this piece of the future? Isn’t that what this album is?
It is essential to strive for this. Even if today there are plenty of things that show us that… I think that everything is also a story of vigilance.
Amo and Odi is it not above all an album of hope? The hope that our future will propel being before having?
Yes, the duality of the verb to be and the verb to have. Of course, it’s essential and I think that when you arrive in a certain age group like mine, in fact, you realize that all the same, what you are is more important than what you are. ‘we have.