Lara Fabian is the special guest on 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, life memories 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 on her meeting with the boss, Johnny Hallyday, who gave her confidence, on her vocation to pass on 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: To summarize the love you received from your parents, there is a first name, Lara, which comes from the main character of the Doctor Zhivago. It was the first declaration of love they could make to you.
Lara Fabian : It’s true. Mom was in love with this character and I later discovered this incredible duality in the love that a part of me carries.
It is no coincidence that Your pain talks about transmission. When we cross-check a little, we understand better why each time this title exists in your life.
It’s true that my mother was particularly attentive, particularly empathetic. So I don’t know if all our parents always had the virtue of hearing in real time what our pain or sorrow was, but I received enough love to understand that in any case they were trying to help me in difficult times.
At first you wanted to be Rudolf Nureyev, you wanted to dance. Was that really a childhood dream?
Yes, I wanted to dance. And then, I met someone who was not very kind in an academy, who crushed my left foot with his stick saying that I was fat and that “no one could ever have lifted that“When you’re eight years old, it’s quite violent, it’s quite cruel and so it stayed inside me without ever finding an exit, a way out. So I dance for myself, that’s all.
Who believes in you first in this whole journey?
My grandmother, my dad, and my mom, who always had a rather complicated relationship with the consequences of this job, because she foresaw them. Mom had a very long-term vision of what this job could be, its effects. As she wanted to protect me from everything, knowing that it was perfectly impossible, she sometimes kept me a little at a distance, didn’t necessarily tell me that what I wrote resonated with her or she didn’t necessarily tell me that she liked the voice I had. But she kept me in another comfort zone. She brought me love in a different way. While dad was more of a fan. He accompanied me on the guitar in my first radio talent shows, TV talent shows.
“When I was 14, 15, 16, the first piano bars where I sang, it was my dad who accompanied me.”
Lara Fabianto franceinfo
Slowly, I realized that it wasn’t that Mom didn’t like what I was doing or wasn’t in love with the choice, but that she was terrified of everything that was about to unfold beneath my feet.
Subsequently, there will be Aziza is in tears in 1986.
This is the gift I won on a radio talent show the year Daniel Balavoine died. It was my first original composition.
You are 18 years old in 1988 and a rather strong event is going to happen. You are going to be spotted for Eurovision and you are going to represent Luxembourg.
Spotted in a bar. An argument broke out, but I sang past the argument. Later, when I asked Hubert Terheggen “Why me, with all those you auditioned?”he will answer me: “Because when the fight broke out, you didn’t back down, you kept singing Somewhere over the rainbow, while guys were putting stools on each other’s faces. It was pretty crazy“. And he said to me: “Because you had that aplomb. I thought you had the nerve to be in front of 700 million viewers anyway“.
Despite love, you will need to emancipate yourself. You will fall in love and go live in Canada. Was it hard to bear, to leave everything?
In fact, it was vital to build myself. I left with Rick Allison. We landed in this French-speaking bubble in the middle of North America called Quebec. And there, we found a real home, a lot of love, a lot of cordiality, an incredible simplicity in doing this job. And that’s where everything was going to start, where I learned my job, where I learned and defined the contours of who I am.
“I can make mistakes in front of the cameras without it really being counted. Quebec, for that, is an incredible country.”
Lara Fabianon franceinfo
And then there is France which comes behind with the album Pure in 1996. How did you experience this moment when you “changed” location. It’s just a geographical situation, but it also changes the audience.
Like a vagal shock. There is really a kind of: “But what is happening?” Because it is true that there, for the moment, it was dazzling, that is to say Allovernight, became a huge hit. Then there was I love youthen the invitation to the stadium by Johnny Hallyday with Requiem for a fool. I had already sold two million albums. And it was really bigger than me. There was a big part of everything that happened that I was absolutely not equipped for, at all, zero.
Tell us about All. What does this song represent today?
It’s a song about a huge breakup that we turned into a huge success. It was crazy to see that what made sense to me at that moment and that was born out of disarray, could connect with millions of people and make sense to millions of people.