Spring already? A harbinger, certainly. Arthur H’s new disc is a constant spring. It’s life that beats. Joyfully.
When Arthur sings in falsetto the key words of the title song and opening song, we feel him carried away by a sweet euphoria. Listening to him, we are all perky too. “May a caress pass through you / May a gaze enlighten you and protect you / May someone originally take you by the hand / And whisper life to you / Life has healed you “.
In the next song, The road, to impulsive music in which a gypsy clarinet interferes, Arthur continues his momentum: “You are the road, the dust, the pleasure / What you want to live, you live it”. And so on, until the final dazzling of The star. “I see better at night / I love it and I follow it”.
“I didn’t want to do a feel good movie, as we say in Quebec”, relativizes the one who has frequented us (and loves us, and vice versa) since the 1980s. Does anyone remember his Bachibouzouk Band, with the Ondes Martenot? They wave again, the ace handler Thomas Bloch is back, and he also feels the Cristal Baschet. Enjoyable sounds of the mystery of life. “It’s true that there is a desire to celebrate the life drive, versus the death drive. It’s not a fight between good and evil. The life drive is what liberates, what feels good, what makes us present to ourselves. The death drive is what makes us feel stuck, that we undergo a form of confinement, whether physical, mental or emotional. »
find the child
Like every time we talk to Arthur H, there are pauses. He thinks, a squadron of angels passes. Above all, do not fill this beautiful silence. He goes on: “It wasn’t conscious when we made this record, but I feel very strongly a desire to reconnect with something that belongs… To childhood. When you are a child, you have this faculty of enthusiasm, you are insatiable, you want to discover, to know. It is a very powerful impulse. And even arrived, like me, at an advanced age, the child is there. But along the way, something akin to disappointment happens. What falls on us is not what we were sold. It’s not the palace of wonders that we were dangled. It’s more like a bad old carnival. But the drive for life is still there and still powerful. »
I didn’t want to make a feel-good movie, as we say in Quebec
He felt it when he came out of the hospital where, for ten days, he fought the COVID (“I was not tubed, but almost…”), the desire to live was fresh and new. Arthur was bathed in light. The full light, not the pale: the glare of beauty. which is everywhere. Even on the deck of the Titanic. A song depicts one of the musicians of the famous orchestra who continued against all odds: “No one will come out unscathed / From this trap / I don’t care, I play / For the night and the stars / I play for the love / Infinite life”.
Long live Brigitte Fontaine free!
These are all freedom songs. Even those that describe the prisons of the modern world: Addicted And The madness of control. “Everything is done so that we never stop to think about what constrains us. What, for me, is particularly dangerous for freedom, it is how the industrialists and the governments attack our intimacy. Anonymity, secrecy, is perceived as undesirable. Our silences, our friendships… we are not interested in our life outside consumption. They offer us a lot of technologies to keep us busy, to monitor us. To take the true measure of a free life, you have to say what you are freeing yourself from. “Song, poetry, that’s what I can do. »
Produced with his companion, the contemporary artist Léonore Mercier, who collaborated in the writing and artistic direction of the album, the work becomes a film disc. On a piano background, but above all sumptuous strings (arranged by the faithful Nicolas Repac), we are thus free to push the experience further. It includes divine blasphemy, a tribute to the most free singer of all: Brigitte Fontaine. “For me, who has known her since I was born, she represents audacity. She has never stopped creating outside the molds, it’s fluid, it comes out. And she has the courage to assume that she is absolutely outside the norm and mold. She perfectly embodies what I’m trying to express in this record. She is life. »