Every day, a personality invites herself into the world of Élodie Suigo. Today, the singer, lyricist and composer, Juliette. In February 2022, she released the album “Songs from where the eye arises” and will be on June 5 and 6, 2023 at La Cigale.
Juliette is a jack-of-all-trades, singer, lyricist and composer all at the same time. Her love for words, rhymes, literature, poetry quickly made her want to play with all this material made up of letters and meaning. A clever mix of perfectly weighed and chosen ingredients such as humor, fantasy, a touch of nostalgia too, but always positive, in any case preferably. Each publication of one of his albums is experienced as a constructed event, like a play. In February 2022, she published a new album Songs from Where the Eye Lays that is 12 titles, 12 tables of life. She will also be in concert on June 5 and 6, 2023.
franceinfo: You are known and respected for your outspokenness, for your ability to deliver things to us without detours and yet, despite everything, you maintain great modesty. By writing, do you ultimately protect yourself from his emotions? And is it easy or difficult to surrender?
Juliet: It’s always a way of indulging in writing, even if you don’t say:” I“, a very personal “I”. I start from the principle that this is not necessarily the most interesting. What is fun is to take this material and dress it with references greater than me, to go into the exploration of feelings, stories and then also leave the listener free to make their own images.
There is a lot of humor, systematically. Humor, what is it? Is it a form of protection, a form of dramatization too?
But not necessarily in fact. It is above all an observation which is that at a given moment… I remember my father’s funeral, I was 25 and at one point, we had a fit of laughter with my mother. We were sad as hell, but we had a laugh because it was raining, it was gray, it was gloomy and she looks at me like that and says to me: “It really is a time of burial“. And we left to laugh because there was nothing else to do! And in fact, in the songs, there is often that, something serious which can contain cheerfulness or Obviously, it’s always this idea of a camera like that, like a new field, if you move the camera back, you don’t see the same thing.
I wondered at what age you wanted to take up the pen.
From the moment I started reading, I wanted to write.
There was the story of the stage, the story of the public performance which attracted me a lot, I must have been 15 years old. I was playing the piano, I was already singing a few songs. That bit me a bit. Afterwards, I started to write a few songs, then I said to myself: it’s complicated, the lyrics require work, so I’m going to leave that to others and I’m mainly going to make music. Then it took me after, in my thirties, to write really seriously, I started to write songs and said to myself: oh, that’s not bad, that’s funny.
There is also a real work of memory. You pay homage to Jacques Brel, Jean Guidoni, Anne Sylvestre. Is it important for you to know where you come from? Who are the people who inspired you, who supported you?
It’s one of the amazing things about the song. It’s that finally, we can get to the song, to make the song just because we want to, while having listened to not much. This is no doubt why Gainsbourg spoke of minor art. There is this very popular, very immediate side. You can sing without having any notion of what the song is.
You built it effectively like a play, but like each of your albums. Each song is a bit of an act. Is the stage the most beautiful place of expression for you?
Ah yes, for me, yes. Finally, it is above all the most beautiful place to live in reality, that is to say that without that, I am missing something. I am a little amputated from something and it is sure that it has been a particular observation in recent years to say to oneself that indeed human beings are not only thirsty for work and money, they have also want to cultivate themselves, to discover and to have fun, to have fun.
There is a song that is absolutely sublime in this album called The wig. You talk about cancer.
I’m talking about mourning. I’m talking about losing someone. Particularly after this disease. But it’s above all a song about mourning that passes, where you end up saying to yourself: well there you go, I will inevitably forget, well, in any case, I will console myself.
Does death scare you?
I don’t know, actually. I have a little doubt on the question… What scares a lot of people too, is the front. This is how it’s going to get us to this point of no return. Of course I dream of dying without realizing it, sleeping in my sleep and not waking up because, well, we won’t realize anything. Death in itself doesn’t scare me, it’s what comes before.
When we say Juliette, we think of freedom. Are you free ?
I tend to settle for what I have and thank heaven for it every morning.
I think so. I don’t have crazy desires, alienating things like I absolutely have to make a million before I’m 30.
Finally, isn’t this album primarily used to lay down arms?
I thought it was good as an end of the album, Brel’s song, Look very small and above all it was good that the album ended with this sentence: ” You can put away the weapons“. There is an observation like that around bad anger, to say: “Perhaps, itit’s good to put away the weapons” and then to say to oneself: ” Here, let’s see who will come next time without first taking out the weapons!“