Long and disparate. First impression. Not unpleasant at all, but disconcerting. Seventeen titles, extended texts. More than varied music, as if we were changing places each time. A feature length, almost. And the songs like so many scenes.
It’s like a Lelouch, well, built on flashback, over a lifetime. “It’s the way I imagine things and the way I dream of my records being received, especially this one. Like a cinematographic journey”, confides Benjamin Biolay about his new album, entitled St. Clairwhich is slated for release on September 9.
A main character
At the end of the line, the singer-songwriter is not unhappy. The intention and the result agree, it makes sense. “Everything starts from Saint-Clair, with the sea, the Mediterranean, which for me is a main character. ” The point of view. The witness.
It’s the way I imagine things and the way I dream of my records being received, especially this one. Like a cinematic journey.
Biolay grew up in the middle of the city of Sète, in a central district: Saint-Clair. Since Brassens wrote and composed Plea to be buried on the beach of Sètethe whole world sums up the place to the song and said beach.
“When I was little, people complained about it. Now that he’s gone, Brassens has become ubiquitous in the city. »
Leave and come back
It all starts in Saint-Clair, it all ends in St. Clair : it is the title which closes the disc. “The dogs bark and the years pass […] Five hours and dust / Saint-Clair / Six hours and dust / Saint-Clair “, and so on, seven hours, eight hours … The film ends and it starts again: it’s the grace of the records, everything plays and play again. Flashback first loves in rosy cheeks, flashback series of dead loves in (A) Ravel, flashback of a bitter rupture in Return the love.
And it goes around like that, not necessarily in order, according to still vivid regrets, rekindled ecstasies and not at all hazy memories. Evocations of “lost years” and “dead friends” in city lights.
There is like a torpor. Sometimes the jolt of agony turns into a life drive.
When we get to However, a shock: “Yet I did my best to die young”. We understand why this album is long. Too long, on purpose. “There is like a torpor,” says Biolay. Until some kind of revival. “Sometimes, he continues, the jolt of agony turns into an impulse for life. »
The unbearable remains: while we are still alive, all around, accomplices are dying. “Life is long / It kills the good / First of all”, he sings very softly, lulled by an acoustic guitar. “That is the hardest thing. I am losing loved ones, very, very close ones. I arrive at this period of life…” he slips.
On the trail of his own footsteps
He is 49 years old. “And at the same time, there is a war in Europe! Indeed, it dies at any age, in Ukraine. The song is beautiful and sad, the rhythm is delicately bossa, we think of Henri Salvador, an important deceased, for whom Benjamin Biolay and his sister, Coralie Clément, worked in 2000, before Biolay’s first album: “Yes, I revisit my beginnings, I wander through the styles I’ve covered along the way. »
Recorded at four, live “for the first time in my career”, it speaks of death, but it lives very strongly. “It’s four hearts beating together, for the same purpose…”
It allows all flashback to resonate in the present. All the more so when the very dear Clara Luciani comes to sing Santa Clara (September on a Thursday evening) with him. Pleasure of the voices which stick together and pleasure of the musician with other musicians. “There, I had fun playing the guitarist! “And Biolay to add:” That’s why life happens to many. »