Revealed in 2019, by a Robberythe first album noticed by fans of French song, Marie-Flore returned at the beginning of the summer with I don’t know if it’s okay. A second opus that she defends this fall on the roads of France (November 16 in Lyon, 18 in Beauvais, 25 in Trappes…) before an Olympia, in high point, on April 6. Several of his new titles have been cut with the idea of making them come into their own on stage.
“I have always focused primarily on intimate songs. I came to music playing the guitar or the piano in my room, explains the young thirty-year-old. Dressing up my songs with more energetic rhythms and big productions was not necessarily innate to me. This desire came from my meeting with the public. I wanted to exult live on certain titles. »
The key to this album lies at the heart of its third track, I know it’s late. “’I know there are happy sorrows and sad joys’ is the first sentence that came to me in the process of writing the record. She is the one who says the most about me. It transcribes well my overall state, a state of melancholy, confides Marie-Flore. I use writing to exorcise my darkest parts, to talk about what I observe of the world, of people and of myself. »
“My roots are ‘garage rock’, and that doesn’t infuse my productions at all”
When asked what were his influences: surprise. “When I am asked the question, my answer is paradoxical because it is very different from the result in the studio,” she warns. “My roots are garage rockthe folk of the 1960s and that does not infuse my productions at all”, continues the artist whose first name was inspired by his parents by the eponymous song by Joan Baez.
Recently it is Future Nostalgia of Dua Lipa who packed it. “The album was released during the first confinement. He fell well. Musically, he is amazing. There is everything: sexy, emotional and crazy productions. I was in awe,” she applauds. On the French song side? After specifying that she “grew up outside of French musical culture”, Marie-Flore weaves laurels to Benjamin Biolay: “He probes souls and himself very well. It bounces the words between them. “At the end of September, he sang I know it’s late in duet with her at La Cigale – “It was an honor that he put his voice on my words. »
The singer, who says she is much less close to the “culture of telecrochets” than “bars and cellars underground where [elle a] started”, has patiently built her furrow since she left college in the first year. A manager had just spotted her on MySpace. “I was petrified when I had to sing my songs in front of him,” she recalls. Until then, I saw music as something confined to the walls of my room and me. »
“I take aging wisely”
If, since then, she has undeniably gained in confidence, other injunctions parasitize her. In his song 20 years, she talks about her relationship to the passage of time and to youthism too often imposed as an essential value. “I’m not saying it was better before. I’m just saying that it’s not easy to exceed the age that pleases so much, ”she sings.
“Basically, I was not aware that it was a concern. This phrase came out on its own in the studio. While writing it, I felt the pressure, says the author, composer and performer. I take the fact of aging wisely, the more we advance and the more we know what we no longer want. But we are also criticized for growing old. The more time goes by, the more difficult it is to find your place in the music and to “stay in the game”. “May Marie-Flore be reassured, she is in full bloom.