The refrain is well known: “I was born this morning, my name is Mercy…” What the general public probably does not know, on the other hand, is that the child in question in the song of Madame Monsieur celebrates his 5th birthday this Monday, March 21. Since the first confinement, the little girl and her mother, Taïwo, have lived in France and the two artists are in regular contact with her.
“Mercy and her mom have been in our lives for five years and we’ve been in theirs,” says Emilie Satt, the duo’s singer, in a video posted on Twitter on Monday. It looks beautiful like that, but if you knew everything behind it, it’s a crazy thing. »
With her acolyte on the stage and husband in the city Jean-Karl Lucas, she decided to tell for the first time publicly this story long kept secret. And it is at the microphone of the Nude podcast that the two artists have chosen to tell the story of this adventure that goes far beyond the musical framework.
A song and a story
“There are a lot of things that we kept to ourselves, that we did not allow ourselves to say and, often, we felt a little alone”, advances Jean-Karl Lucas in the first of the seven episodes of Mercy’s Odyssey posted on Monday.
The couple tells in particular how, this day of March 2017, the tweet of a journalist of Nice morning, Grégory Leclerc, upset them. The reporter was on The Aquarius, a ship helping migrants in the Mediterranean. It echoed the birth, on board, in its chaotic conditions, of a little girl who was soon to be named Mercy (“grace” and “mercy” in English). This inspires Madame Monsieur with a song that will lead the duo to Eurovision. The story will not end the day after the song contest. On the contrary, at this time, it is only beginning…
The episodes, which will be published in dribs and drabs, will also feature Mercy’s voice and that of Taïwo, who will deliver “a rare testimony to what lies behind this word: migrant”, according to Julie Marceline, the creator of the podcast. Nude.