In 2017, there was the spark with Girlfriend. Juliette Armanet had moved and seduced us, a musical love at first sight for her melancholy, her vulnerability, her madness too. Four years later, the singer is back with Burn the fire. A second incandescent album available this Friday, in which she calls for “the amorous insurrection”.
She talks about passion, desire, sorrows. She faces it with groove and ardor The last day of the disco, take the risk of playing the piano at Imagine love or even try to To save [sa] life in a frantic title. From one song to another, the singer and musician oscillates between lightness, sensuality, ardor, without ever getting rid of this sweet and beautiful melancholy. 20 minutes met the flamboyant Juliette Armanet.
After a first album as much acclaimed by the critics as the public, the release of the second was eagerly awaited. Did that put any pressure on you?
Huge pressure! But for the moment I have received some great messages, very caring and enthusiastic about the first songs I released. The signals are so positive that it really gives me confidence and it’s great to have the green lights. Always this story of fire that obsesses me!
When you come out of this success, of a great tour, is it a little dizzying to find yourself again in front of yourself and your piano?
It’s really dizzying to start recomposing a second record, especially after a big tour. I had a child and I practically gave birth on stage, I was really very, very pregnant until the end. There was a real dizziness and at the same time the urge to say “who have I become now?” what do I have to say to myself? What will this album be made of? When you start a new record there is also a little curiosity to see what will come out of it. It is a mirror that we hold out to ourselves, it’s quite psychoanalytic in the end: how am I going to see myself? And something quite flamboyant comes out of it.
Almost all of the songs in “Burn the Fire” revolve around love. How did this theme come to you?
I would find it hard to talk about anything other than romantic feelings. These feelings intertwine friendship and family at the same time… All our stories are made of love, so it explores the whole range of our intimacy. But it’s good to talk about love, especially in our time, we have to keep talking about it more than ever. I have the impression that this is the sinews of war.
Do you think you are deeply romantic and sentimental?
I think the fact that my name is Juliette must have played a role in the construction of my identity! My parents called me Charlotte and finally they changed after a few hours because they found that I didn’t have a Charlotte face at all. I think they baptized me under the seal of legendary loves! It’s my destiny ! (laughs)
A certain spirit of independence emanated from the first album, here you seem like feet and fists linked to the feeling of love which is declined differently …
It’s funny that you feel that because I really feel that this album is much more liberating than the first one. But it’s funny, this stuff is completely public and there are no truths actually. You feel that, I feel something else but what matters is that everyone finds their meaning. For me this record was a liberation record, a bit like “I will survive”. There is something of the order of leaving lost loves behind, of singing them to exorcise them. Afterwards, obviously there are themes of obsession, a lot of things talk about desire, it’s a pretty sensual record. He is all fire, there is something very fiery, he is very visceral! Even in the way of singing we are close to the cry sometimes, it will almost seek until it bursts. There is something very lived in, perhaps a little less tender than the first.
To present this album, you unveiled for first track “The first day of disco”, a twilight track, as energetic as it is melancholy. What does it mean to you?
It’s a funny mixture because at the same time it is a real rather melancholy opera drama and at the same time there is an energy, a light. A very physical and very dancing thing that makes her full of hope and vitality. It’s a bit of a tightrope walk song that walks between death and life, night and day, love and the end of love. A bit of a relationship climax, the last ten seconds before you turn on the lights when you’re in a nightclub. The culmination of an emotion. It’s possible that after that moment there is the fall, but I can’t tell if it’s the opening scene of a movie or the end. There is a bit of ambiguity. Afterwards, this song can speak at the same time of the end of a world, of a love… There are lots of different scales and meanings and I like the idea of not answering them, that everyone can put what he wants to find there.
There’s also the accompanying clip where you let go completely!
I had a lot of aches afterwards, but yes it feels good, even to sing about our disappointments. It is a way of taking power over our sorrows, of transforming them, of not being crushed by them, of dancing them because they allow us to survive.
Apart from the disco, another musical register invites itself in this album, that of the pop of the 1990s with “Boom boom baby” which evokes “It Ain’t Over ’til It’s Over” by Lenny Kravitz. Are you nostalgic for those years?
As there is something very soulful in this record, I was really inspired by it, I listened to the Mariah Carey, the Boys II Men, the Fugees… All this time also where the singers were making vibes! We do not allow ourselves too much in France because it is not our culture, the language is not very suitable for that. I liked the idea of revisiting this way of singing a little, of daring the “babyyy”, the vibes! Kind of like Ophélie Winter did at one point. It was super addicting, there was something very uninhibited, very Americanizing but cool!
In this love song you say in particular: “I don’t want to change the record, I wind up in a loop”. Are you the type who listens to a song or album over and over again?
Totally! I’m a basic obsessive and when I like a song I’ll listen to it, come on I don’t know, 2,500 times! I have no limit, I almost overdose. Right now I’m listening to a song by P.R2B called My best life which I find extraordinary, a masterpiece.
Slow also appears in this album, with songs like “L’épine” or “J’te le gives”. Would you like spectators to dance slows at your concerts?
Serious! I love it because it’s a kind of nuptial dance that we have between human beings to flirt with each other, but also to do each other good, to comfort each other. It’s always a little embarrassing a slow, we have the smell of the other, his breath, we are not necessarily at the same pace … It’s close to something in love and at the same time it can also be very friendly. And I like the notion of “slow”, the fact of slowing down and being able to dance slowly because that is more exposed. I have very strong emotions of slows where suddenly the world shrinks, it’s beautiful.
“You play me”, “I only think about that”… We find in this album your taste for playing with words and their ambiguities.
As I only talk about love in my songs, and it’s a bit like the chestnut tree that everyone is talking about, the interest for me is to be able to have an originality in the writing, to find a particular paw . I attach a lot of importance to formulas, to what it will evoke as an image in the listener, to puns and even sometimes things that are not necessarily understandable so that it muddies the waters a little. It has to amuse me the first so that it makes laugh or moves others so I spend a lot of time.
There is also “Imagining Love”, a piano song about the fantasy of a love that will never exist. Do you have as much pleasure in fantasizing love as you enjoy living it?
Yes, because love is made up of fantasies. This feeling is venerated in art, in films, in literature, in sculpture… This is what gives it so much meaning, intrigue and interest. It’s a feeling that lends itself to fantasy, fiction, dream … I have the impression that Imagine love tells about the fact that even when the stories are over, whether it is stories of love, friendships or people we have lost in a concrete way, we still have this territory of the imagination that allows us to always love people wherever you are. No one will ever be able to kidnap you, it is your territory of freedom to be able to dream of love. It often consoles to be able to dream of lost loves, it also gives them existence. Love is made for that, for fiction.
Your son’s voice appears at the end of this song. Have you discovered another form of love with your child?
It’s a bit of a prehistoric love. “Discovering a love” is exactly that. Unlike passionate love or the love of a couple, there is very little talk about maternal love in the books. In the book The baby by Marie Darrieussecq, she tells how much maternal love is forgotten by art. Apart from the Madonna who is in all the churches. We don’t talk much about it so what is good is that we can really experience it for ourselves, we are much less calibrated for that. I’m still discovering a love that I didn’t know at all, like when you taste a flavor you don’t know, a color you’ve never seen or when you laugh for the first time! There is all the dizziness of these new sensations which can be trying and very destabilizing, and there is the encounter. It is a bond that is woven for life, no matter what, there is no escape from a rupture. There is another relation to time that is taking place and it is very confusing. I have the impression that maternal love keeps changing.
This album ends with “Brûler le feu” which gives it its title. You wanted to end on this fiery and vehement note, on this igniting match?
There is a bit of a love insurrection, it’s almost a revolutionary slogan. Let’s burn the fire, love each other, it’s a little flower power but a fiery version. It is a praise of desire, passion, the feeling of love in what is most vibrant, most beautiful. It is a praise of the couple too I think, to say that it is a life to burn fire, to experience fire in all its forms. There is the idea of always being awake, that love always remains a fire that is never extinguished.