As usual, he started by putting his bag and his guitar on the other side of the world to compose this new opus, Under a huge sun coming out Friday. 11,000 kilometers from Paris, not in Brazil, which he knows well (and from which he brought back the magnificent Fortaleza, 1979), but in Buenos Aires. “I moved in February 2019, I stayed three months, I saw all the possible concerts. It’s a city that lives late at night, not like here in Paris where at 10 p.m. people moan when there is has music “, He tells AFP in the premises of his manager, between a synthetic crocodile on the floor and a bust-statue of a panther, it cannot be invented.
“In Buenos Aires, there are still artists’ quarters, but taking cross-sections, I also saw whole streets full of safe-deposit boxes – I didn’t put it in my songs – like in Bangkok where a district only sells car batteries “, he develops, inexhaustible. The eye is always observant and the chronicler’s pen inspired behind the cumbia or tango notes here and there. Whether to sing about the rampant inflation in Argentina (The Porteños are tired) or the shadow advisers at the top of the state, on this side of the Atlantic, these “little marquises “, “never elected, always chosen” (Beautiful days). The Corruption hang up the cars where he left them with The extraordinary adventures of a banknote, title of 1975.
Lavilliers even covers another storyteller of his time, Bob Dylan, with his 1963 title Who killed Davey Moore? (later adapted in French by Graeme Allwright). The great idea is to also hear the voices of Eric Cantona, Gaëtan Roussel, Izïa and Hervé embodying the protagonists of this tragic boxing slice.
Another choral title, I got from her evokes his hometown, Saint-Etienne, with the electro-pop duo Terrenoire, which owes its stage name to a popular district of this city where these two brothers are also from. “I’m half a century apart from them, it was quite funny to confront our visions”, delights the singer-songwriter who has just celebrated his 75th birthday. With this title, he also speaks of the mother country and of the mother itself, since we learn that it is his which gave him his first guitar. The disc opens on The heart of the world, but it is about his, which almost let go at the beginning of the year, in the upsetting last piece Elsewhere.
Today in great shape, he does not want to talk about this cardiac alert and his stay in the clinic. But still confides: “I was in between (between life and death), but I was calm, very calm, there are some that panic, me not at all, this song is a roundabout tribute to the people who took me out of there, these nurses, these medics, these sentries who are watching us “. He admits, amused: “Alright they told me to try to calm down (on its own pace, between travel and music). It does not mean that I am sleeping more, but I am resting “.