Author, composer, performer, musician and actress, Izïa took her first steps with her father, Jacques Higelin, under the benevolent gaze of her mother, the Tunisian dancer and singer Aziza Zakine. Music has always been part of his life. From her parents, she inherited words and that rare quality that is freedom. She released her fifth album, Speed.
franceinfo: Do you finally trust yourself?
Izia: Yes. The answer is yes !
Is it important to take the time to find your way, to know where you feel best?
I think with every album, I had found my way by then. An album for me is really a photo in time of a period. It turns out that now I have fifteen years of career behind me and when I started, I was fifteen years old. I necessarily sought myself, like everyone else, on the road of life, but in any case my path as an artist, musician, author, there, I refine it.
It’s about your father in this album. It’s true that it’s a declaration of love to what he left you, passed on, gave. I would like to talk about the song royala need to write to address him directly.
It’s something I really wanted to tell him. It’s a song that tells the genesis of our absolute unconditional love. And that moment when we “separated”, but like a father, like someone who has to let his child fly away, at some point. So, we never left each other, we sang together, we often saw each other and all that, but obviously, we no longer had this fusional, loving, completely crazy thing that we had in my childhood and in my teens. It’s normal, I was becoming a woman.
“What I wanted in the song ‘Royale’ was to make peace with everything that we kind of missed with my father.”
I always said to myself that we would meet around my child, around lots of things, that we would have this great discussion that you want to have one day with your parents, adult, you ask them all the questions that you’ve wanted to ask them all your life. But life meant that we were never able to have that moment. It was something that was extremely painful to live with. It’s crazy all the same that in the middle of this life, of all the lives in the world, I was the daughter of this person.
What does this album represent for you?
A statement. I think I’ve never been so sincere. I didn’t hide behind, no fake poetry like there could be in Citadel, style effects to protect me. There, I went there in an ultra frontal way, whether musically, in my texts, in my voice, because I also think that the period we went through really put me in a state of mind to tell me: we don’t really have time to hide anymore, we don’t have time to go through a thousand paths. I’m going to make the album that I want to make without stopping myself from anything. It’s a really free album.
This album is also a bit like the definition of what you have become over time. You really started on the scene very early. The first voices at seven years old, the first part of Iggy Pop. Extraordinary things have always happened in your life. How did you manage to keep your feet on the ground? Keep your identity?
I have always been, even if full of doubts that goes without saying, very anchored in what I wanted to do.
“In my journey, there is nothing calculated. There is just music, the love of music.”
The logical consequence is that this album will live on stage, is this the Holy Grail for you?
It is downright the Grail. And inevitably, the pieces on stage, when you address them to an audience, they suddenly take on a scale, but fantastic! And for me, that’s the stage, it’s really magical. I’m really looking forward.
What place does the public occupy in your life? He has always carried you.
It’s amazing the strength it gives me. That’s why for the past five years, I wasn’t completely myself because I was missing a fundamental part of my life, people. It’s the guarantor, being able to be one with the crowd. Me, I’m a carnival, I’m on the road and I go to see people. I often say that it’s not the people who come to see me in concert, it’s me who goes to see.
The cure is a song that came, you were on a terrace contemplating the sky. You were thinking about your father and when you got back to the studio, your partner told you that he was also thinking about your father. You saw this as a message.
It was really crazy. There, I thought of my father and said to myself: when am I going to stop thinking about him? When will it go away? I was there: but no, it will never go away. And I come home and Bastien was playing the piano like that and I start to sing. I take out this sentence: the passage of time is the remedy for life. This sentence, it came to me from nothingness, from the abyss and it came out of me as if it was not even me who pronounced it. I know it was my dad who told me that. And so, when I say that to Bastien half in tears and he says to me: “It was your father who whispered those piano notes to me. I’ve been playing them since a while ago, but I felt like it wasn’t really me playing them.”. This is the story of that.
What’s next?
There, I don’t want to stop. I’m telling you right away, you’re going to eat some Izïa Higelin!