Lara Fabian is the special guest of Le Monde d’Élodie all this week. Five days to talk about her 30-year career with its ups and downs. The one that the French saw arrive from Quebec in the 1990s with a powerful voice that touches the heart, has become, over the course of her 16 albums, an artist who counts in both French-speaking and English-speaking countries. It is without filter that she opens up by evoking bits of her history, memories of life around her songs that have become cult: I love you , Adagio, I Will Love Again, I still believe in, Immortal, You are my other, Humana or The difference. She returns to her meeting with the boss, Johnny Hallyday, who gave her confidence, on her vocation to transmit what she learned to others and then above all she underlines the importance of a feeling which warms closed hearts: empathy.
For three decades, Lara Fabian has never ceased to offer insight into life, with its joys and sorrows, pages that turn and adventures that begin, to her precious audience. As a prelude to the release of a 17th album planned for the end of 2024, she offered us last January the single Your pain, written and composed with Slimane and confirms that a tour is coming.
franceinfo: 30 years of career, 16 studio albums, soon 17. There is already a small common point in all these songs, it is love. Is love definitely the sinews of war?
Lara Fabian : It’s the fifth element for me. It’s what can really rebuild everything and uncreate everything too. It’s cellular, it’s in my DNA. I’ve never apologized for it.
You start your career with I love you. What kind of lover are you?
Present, attentive, generous, fiery, I can be passionate. I sometimes recognize limits to passion, painful limits and otherwise also playful.
How do you view the passing of time?
A friendly look. I thank him. He was my ally.
“Without time, I would never have had the space to release some things, to understand others, to welcome some and to refute others.”
Lara Fabianto franceinfo
Your single was recently released Your pain written and composed with Slimane. There, you decide to take up the pen again. Is it important for you that it happens today, on this song?
I still had things to say, to convey. It had been six years since I had written anything. Even longer than that, since when I wrote Butterfly…It’s been seven years.
Do you miss writing? What does it bring you?
It is both nourishment and liberating. So I can feed on it, as well as use it to unburden myself of something. But it is fundamental in my approach since my voice is always at the service of what I feel. And if what I feel, I manage to translate it, everything is aligned, everything is right.
Inevitably, Your pain is a title that resonates with a lot of people because everyone can relate to it. Isn’t that also what Lara Fabian is? A universal language, to be able to talk to us about things that affect us personally.
It is not a voluntary approach to speak as if it were a universal language, but I realize that in a very simple way, what passes through me passes through you. I remember this magnificent sentence, someone was talking about artists saying: “You know, artists are hypersensitive.“Everyone is hypersensitive and therefore everyone can take on this need to be heard, to be listened to. And Your painthat’s what she’s talking about.
So this is an excerpt from the upcoming new album?
Absolutely. Which will be released at the end of 2024. Slimane and I have the ambition to tell this story together. We have the ambition to fragment it over several songs, but to tell this story, to talk about love, about these many wounds, these handicaps, these self-limiting beliefs. We intend to talk about the body too, about what this incredible vessel can tell us and that we never listen to. Then, how do we do it? How do we find the words that will resonate for everyone, that will be both simple enough and profound enough? That’s the challenge.
At the age of nine, you wrote your first songs. They were breaths, that’s what you said at the time, a fragment of a diary. Today, we have the feeling that it’s something else, that it’s starting again and that you continue to write your story and therefore to create your future and your future.
Writing is all the space I allow myself to continue being myself without ever compromising and to always learn to know myself better.
How do you view this journey? On these songs that you have delivered and that no longer belong to you? On this audience that has adopted you? You are the big sister, the little sister, the friend, the confidante of many families.
I feel so much gratitude. Part of me, the child in me, continues to look at him with great wonder and I count my blessings.
“I really see my journey as an immense privilege and so I take care of it. I find it very precious. I consider it a gift.”
Lara Fabianto franceinfo
2024 is the year of the new album. Will there be a tour?
Yes. And I’m very excited about it because I know that there will necessarily be everything that makes me here 30 years later, but I know that there will also be all the new songs and I will really be keen to mix it well so that there is no disappointment. I don’t want to disappoint. I know that everyone wants to hear I love you, Adagio, I Will Love Again, I still believe in, Immortal, You are my other, Humana, The difference but you can’t sing everything otherwise, it’s a playlist that lasts four hours. I hope I can find a way to create desire in people, to listen to the new songs that I have to offer.