Christophe Willem fans can explode with joy. The singer’s new album is out this Friday, September 16. An opus titled Panorama“a nod to rue du Panorama, near where I grew up and next to where I live today“, where he took refuge when he was harassed at school. These repeated attacks during his schooling broke the confidence that Christophe Willem could have had in him: “I was stuck with a label on a sexuality that I didn’t have. I didn’t understand why I was rejected“, he says in The Parisian.
For many at the time, Christophe Willem liked boys. A fact that the main interested party has never confirmed, on the contrary: “For me, sexuality, love, is a personal matter. I always explained it, but people absolutely wanted me to decide. At one time, it was the big fashion for coming out gay. I have always supported these fights, but I could not be a 100% spokesperson for something that does not totally define me. Many people like me have suffered from this very binary, dictatorial definition. Fortunately, the new generation is much more open.”
Another difficulty: the depression he went through after the failure of one of his records. In 2017, Christophe Willem released the album Rio but the work unfortunately does not reap the success he hoped for. He then began a depressive episode during which he questioned everything: “I experienced this failure as a rejection of who I was. I felt like the ugly duckling who sold three records. I found myself in my college yard, stigmatized, singled out. And I wondered if it was worth making yet another album.”
The singer even thought his career was over: “With the failure of Rio, I felt like everything was taken away from me. I even considered not coming back to Les Enfoirés. I like them but I was afraid that people would point the finger at me: ‘Look, it’s the fat loser who sold three records, his career is over.’ I lived with the shame of being a finished artist. ” Christophe Willem finally took it upon himself and walked the stage of the Enfoirés show, a life-saving meeting.
Christophe Willem crossed paths with Slimane, one of the artists he inspired and who made him want to fight: “I talked to him about changing jobs, why not become an architect… He told me that I had made him want to become a singer, he found it very violent that we still had a problem of trust after so many years. .“Thus was born Panorama, his”ode to resilience.“A therapeutic album for him that he hopes”useful to others.“