He chose Fils Cara as his stage name. “I liked the idea of being the mediatized child of a person who is not”, explains the 27-year-old singer whose first album, Amaretto, comes out this Friday. “Cara is a reference to Carmella, my mother’s first name. I wanted to inscribe his lucky star on my career and root my culture. I have the impression of descending from a line of powerful women, some of whom were witches, in Sicily, ”he says, in all simplicity.
If we go back the genealogy of the one who, in the civil status, is called Marc Gros Cannella, we find ourselves, on the maternal side, on the Italian island. “I don’t like to essentialize, but there is a soul in the island and Mediterranean peoples. There musica leggera [les chansons populaires transalpines]is contained in my DNA,” he continues.
Italy gives rhythm to its daily life. He, who listens to Rai radio 1 every morning, says he draws his references from Cinecittà films, Ennio Morricone’s compositions and sound hacks à la Giorgio Moroder. He even plans to apply for the next Sanremo festival, a major event that crowns the best Italian song every year. “I wrote songs for Hervé Vilard’s next album, reveals Fils Cara. He participated in Sanremo in the 1960s, he told me about it and told me that it would be great if I did. If I had the opportunity, it would be great for me. »
“I am very attached to Saint-Etienne”
The young artist also cites Luigi Tenco or Adriano Celentano, among other songwriters – protesters – infusing his creative spirit. “What was on the radio at the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when my maternal grandparents settled in the Giers valley (Loire), is also the music that I try to summon . »
The center of France is the other anchor point for Fils Cara. It was in Saint-Etienne that he was born, in March 1995. “I am very attached to it. We always write where we come from, he says. If I were to speak in more symbolic terms, I would say that the fire of industry that has been left stagnating in the chimneys comes out in the creativity of this city’s current scene. »
Alongside the Herrerias brothers from Terrenoire, Zed yun Pavarotti or La Belle vie, he is one of the most brilliant examples of talent that has appeared in the soil of Saint-Etienne. “Our common point is the lucidity of the contemporary world. Saint-Etienne is a city that is fortunate to be out of the way, a little on the outskirts. She lives on the memory of a past from which she tries to recover,” continues the artist.
“The call of the Parisian vortex”
Although he came from a working-class background – his father was a bus driver and his mother a pastry seller – he “does not claim the position of class defector”. “In my songs, there is a fire which is not bourgeois but which is not anti-bourgeois either, he specifies. The culture to which I had access while pursuing my higher education allowed me to calibrate my music. »
Around the age of 12, Son Cara fell in love with Iggy Pop, Patty Smith, Nick Cave… “Rockstars who work for the search for beauty and poetry”, he believes. He began by writing poems and, around the age of 15, tried his hand at rapping. “It ended up looking like something out of high school. I finally made viable pieces, which liked around me. I feel like I took this career because it corresponded to an inner need, I couldn’t do anything else, ”he says.
Four years ago he signed to Microqlima – which is still his label today – and made his first concert in Paris. “Leaving the live, I said to myself that I could not leave this city. I felt its energy, the call of the vortex,” he confides. He adds that the capital inspires him a lot. “I feel like we’re in the eye of something here, in a metaphorical sense, because we see everything. We are at the confluence of a lot of energies. There is a lot of poetry that emanates from these urban environments and the people you meet there. »
“I do solar grunge”
The Parisian dynamic works well for him, he affirms it and is delighted with it. He released two EPs in 2020, a reissue in 2021, chained a hundred concert dates and refined a first album. He started working on Amaretto three years ago, in the summer. His favorite themes: “the wanderings of the people of [son] age, love, [son] relation to Mediterranean culture”… He defines his musical style by the term “solar grunge”. An oxymoron of his invention that he defines as “pop music with lucid lyrics”.
Fils Cara designed the eleven tracks on the disc with Louis-Gabriel Gonzalez, who produced the opus, his brother Francis and his friends Lucas and Simon Gaspard. “While doing it, we listened to a lot of music from our high school years: MGMT, Black Eyed Peas… Very open pop, which takes risks on sound research with synths, voice modifications, lots of choirs…” Amaretto followed this path.
“The record is populated by the voices of my friends, samples of moments in my life, my declamation of a poem by Eugenio Montale – which opens You are beautiful. This album is a patchwork of spaces. Some verses were recorded in one place and the choruses elsewhere, in different time frames, it ran over two years. » A spatiotemporal cocktail in the image of opposites traversing Fils Cara. There is the heritage of his ancestors that he venerates and the avant-garde that he pursues, the Italian influences that inspire him and the Parisian contemporaneity that shakes him… And that without getting lost along the way, focused on his own compass.