tiny kingdoms. This is the title of the second album of singer-songwriter Thibaud Vanhooland, known as Voyou, in concert Friday at Studio TD at 7 p.m., on the Francos poster. A title that would sum up well the idea that the musician could have of what a song is.
“It’s a bit like that,” he admits at the end of his camera, sitting in his studio, on the other side of the ocean. “A song contains so many things, and at the same time, there is this gap in the narration between a song and a film. In a song, the space is small to be able to describe both sets and characters, with their psychology. It’s true that the song is such a small space to tell big things. »
“It’s even dizzying, sometimes, adds Voyou. Fortunately, there is music, which, when well mastered, helps to set tones, to suggest seasons, colors, atmospheres. »
What the marvelous Thibaud Vanhooland accomplishes with his new album, released last February. The soft strings and horns of the intro that welcome us with open arms, the flutes that point in the direction of Two birds, following. This album is like a jewelry box of pop songs with simple titles — The insects, sun sun, The night the day, Winter, up there, that genre — concealing refined texts. To Afro-Brazilian-inspired music, Voyou imagines charming sketches which, yes, evoke flora and fauna and the seasons, but like so many fables about love and human nature, and not always in a happy way.
bossa nova sad
“We make music that looks like us: I like to party, I like to laugh, I like when relationships are tender between people, I like to do stupid things – but nice things, what “, explains Thibaud. “And there’s something about this music [afro-brésiliennes] : they go well with life. Which can be quite strange since in what I say in my songs, it’s sometimes much harder or sad. »
Because the bossa-nova can also tell sad things, assures the musician. “I have the feeling of being modest compared to all that is sad and hard; suddenly, I need to surround it with cheerful music, as if to lighten the subject. On which, of course, the pandemic (or its repercussions) has left its mark.
Voyou launched a first album in February 2019, a year before the coronaviral screed covered us: “I had a good part of the tour canceled. And even before the pandemic, I had to undergo vocal cord surgery which deprived me of three months of touring – no right to sing, no right to play the trumpet. »
So he learned to play other instruments. “I also made an instrumental record [Chroniques terrestres vol. 1, 2021], which has become a real space for researching arrangements. It gave me a lot of freedom, a place where you no longer need to ask questions about structure or narration. Just make music, in this brilliant laboratory to look for new ways to combine instruments. »
This album nourished the reflection at the origin of the creation of tiny kingdoms, remarkable in the orchestrations of strings, brass and choirs. To hear it, one would think that the musician benefited from more means to arrive at such an opulent result, but, “to tell the truth, there are more or less the same things as on the album before, but [il est] designed differently. In fact, I think I’ve evolved a lot since then, using brass and strings a lot more to try, in fact, to get as far away as possible from electronic matter in order to tell everything with organic matter, real instruments.
Far from the center of the world
Incidentally, the entire rhythm section was recorded in a studio in São Paolo, with friend Diogo Strausz (co-producer of the first album) and Brazilian musicians — “The guys are too strong! — whom Thibaud had recruited for a tour. Back in France, “we didn’t retouch anything they did”, which gives the album this liveliness that jumps out at the ears from the first listens and which recalls the approach of the regretted Pierre Barouhfounder of the Saravah record company and crazy lover of popular Brazilian music.
“I never comment on that, I prefer to let people stick to my music the musical influences they want, and so much the better if they are wrong, but it’s true that I feel much closer to a Barouh, or even certain periods of Henri Salvador and Pierre Vassiliu, say, that of Souchon or Voulzy”, to whom the French press has occasionally compared him. “Souchon, perhaps in the writing of the lyrics, his somewhat tender side, and rather nice, what…”
The other effect of the pandemic on Voyou’s work can be read between the lines of his texts, precisely. About the arrival of the confinements: “I found myself in a house in the Landes, in contact with nature, he says. [Un déménagement] forced after spending years during which everything was going very fast or everything was a bit violent, in a city like Paris, to which I was not used. I left to find myself in a place where everything was calm, far from the center of the world, since in Paris, everyone has the impression of being the center of the world. It really is a city of ego and personal achievement, and that scares me. I was really relieved to feel that I had no importance in what was happening around me, in nature, finally. These are things that I approach on the album, in second, third levels of reading. »