Belgian author, composer, performer, musician, producer, actress and model, Angèle made a sensational entry into the musical world with her first album, released in 2018, Brol. On Friday December 3, 2021, she released her second album, Ninety-five.
franceinfo: Your new album was released a week before the official date. A gift that you gave yourself on your birthday, but also made to the waiting public!
Angela: Indeed, I made myself this little gift of taking it out in advance because I wanted to and I had the time to experience it, to take advantage of this moment, really alone, to give myself a little kif.
On Netflix, we saw Angèle appear in a very intimate documentary. There, this album is also very intimate. I have the impression that the writing, moreover you say it in this album, is an outlet.
Yes. It is very important to have this way of being able to express myself through music and it is a wonderful outlet because it allows me to free myself from certain emotions, from my anxieties, to put them on paper, to sing them.
You emancipate yourself and in this album, there is a lot of you, of your background, of what you lived, of what made you grow, move forward. You started alongside your father, Marka. In Brussels I love you, we think of the covers you did at the beginning of Dick Annegarn. Is it a nod to your development, to your experience?
Yes and that’s why I chose to release the single Brussels I love you first. It was a way of closing the loop in Brussels a little, of describing my love to her once again and in my own way too, of being able, indeed, to talk about my beginnings. It started on Instagram, in bars in Brussels and then, in fact, I found myself projected in Paris. Today I do with both. I love both cities, but Brussels obviously remains my home.
Music has always been part of your life with this school of autonomy that you have known, in which artistic subjects were taught which have helped you a lot and made you want to join a jazz school. It is not necessarily very well known, but you have a real training, a real desire, a real passion.
Yes ! Above all, my father is a musician and singer and so I had the pressure, he was still ultra-attentive. He is self-taught. Me, I was doing classical piano, so I had this thing that he couldn’t really come and see what I was doing because he didn’t really understand this music.
“I have always sung, I have always played the piano.”
When I started music, I really refused his help precisely because I wanted to emancipate myself and then it was not the same thing, we were not on the same register. She was hyper-present in my life.
In the first parts that you did, there were those of Damso. He reached out to you very quickly. Your notoriety, after Silence with him, exploded. Was it obvious that he had to appear on this album?
Yes. I like to tell great stories and I find that the one with Damso was told, but not to the end. We had collaborated together, but not yet on a dance song that could really match our two styles. We had done Silence, at the time, which was a very pretty ballad, but in which I had written very little text. It was a bit of a kind of hyper-sweet musical interlude and when I composed Demons, it was obvious that I had to ask Damso.
You talk about this popularity and say that since being exposed it is not easy and yet you talk about your feelings. At times, is it difficult for you?
It also means that even if it changes everything to be known, but that’s not why I’m going to stop writing songs about what I live and feel because I find it important to continue to do it. My way of surviving, at least mentally, is to be able to write songs. Being able to do it takes away some of my freedom, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to stop doing it. Maybe I’ll do it better, otherwise. The documentary allowed me to acquire this freedom, more than before.
You are committed against sexism, you support the #NousToutes collective, which fights against gender-based and sexual violence. It’s a bit of a sounding board to Balance your what, less fit in.
Balance your what was fit in because I was still young. Finally and luckily, there was a part of naivety in me which made that I was not aware of what it was going to cause, of how the song could be perceived. I believe that if I had known, I would never have dared to do it because I would have been too afraid, of what happened to me, of the negative return of things.
“Music is a great way to be able to continue talking about the things that matter to me, including domestic, marital and sexual violence.”
When we tackle such a subject, obviously, there are people who do not agree. I think that the ideal would be to be able to discuss it and it is rather worrying that we cannot speak about it.
It’s a subject that touches me enormously because I’m a woman and unfortunately, it’s hyper-current and in the daily lives of women around the world, so we have to be able to talk about it. We must deconstruct all gender inequalities and I am convinced that art can lead us to that too.
Angèle will be on tour from April 2022. With Reims, April 20, May 5 in Toulouse, May 10 in Marseille, etc …