Covering music news offers certain privileges. Having access to new albums several weeks before their release is one: there is the raw pleasure of discovery in preview and that of keen curiosity ready to be satisfied. There are also those rare, and therefore particularly magical, moments when a song imposes itself on us. As obvious. She talks to us.
That’s what happened to me with Breathe again by Clara Luciani. I felt a thunderbolt. For its disco sound summoning the soul of an eighties Dalida, the little choral lurch that catches the ear and has repercussions on the movements of the hips… Because, yes, I danced. From the second listen. Then during the third, the fourth and so on.
Long live telecommuting, which gives free rein to improvised choreographies in the living room – in the middle of the open space of 20 minutess, my joy would no doubt have been spoiled by the cautious and mocking looks of certain colleagues.
The bamboo!
It was in the middle of May, I was coming back from a Dutch Eurovision in confined mode, and through the listening link, Clara Luciani unpinned her grenade: “It has to move, it has to tremble , it must still sweat. In the brothel of bars in the evening, scruffy in the dark, you will have to learn to drink again, you will have to breathe again. And here I go, hair down, mentally teleporting onto an underlit dance floor, surrounded by pint-drinkers, burning my calories in jerky gestures. The bamboche, what!
When I interviewed Clara Luciani at the beginning of June, I was careful not to mention my choreographed prowess but I still blurted out: “Breathe again, it’s the hit of the summer! “Ah well, I’d love to!” “, she laughed, letting imagine the big smile that unfolded under her mask.
June 11, the day of the album’s release Heartthe song, carried by an emancipatory clip, was exploited as the second single, taking over from the Stay (“I leave it to you aaah haaan”). Ten days later, 20 minuteswhich had called on Internet users to designate the piece that would be the soundtrack of their summer, gave its verdict. Breathe again was among the most cited. “We want to sing and dance, lose our breath with its two chained choruses, as if breathing together was the only thing that counted in 2021. This song saved my mental health and breathe good renewal”, testified Jean- Daniel, seeming to take the words out of my mouth.
Gold Single
Since then, on YouTube, the clip has exceeded 8.5 million views and 54,000 likes and the song was certified gold single at the end of December by Snep with 15 million stream equivalents. Tube confirmed.
Back to the June interview. Clara Luciani saw “a good alignment of the planets” in the launch of Heart at the dawn of summer. “You know, a record release is decided three months in advance and, three months ago [en mars 2021], it was not too much a question of deconfinement. We saw all the variants coming and we said to ourselves that we were still going to be locked up until Christmas. My album comes out Friday [11 juin]we are in a period where we are gaining in lightness, where we are rediscovering our freedoms a little, so I am trying to find signs in all of this, to tell myself that it is beautiful and that, even if it is not the end of the curfew, it will be postponed to 11 p.m. the day before the exit of Heart. That’s good because it’s a solar disk and dancing and it might have fallen like a hair on the soup if we had stayed locked up. »
Re-reading this verbatim in February 2022 is dizzying as it says a lot about how these last few years have shaken us and how easily we forget the chronology of confinements and curfews (what do you mean, we couldn’t go out after 11pm mid-June?!?).
“It’s funny, I’m writing a song about all of us”
Breathe again, its unifying message on resuming activity after “forced immobility”, only found a more resounding echo. The irony is that this song, initially, was supposed to deal with something completely different. “She was not at all what she became, confided Clara Luciani to 20 minutes. I wanted to talk about a woman who ends up freeing herself from a harmful relationship and who, little by little, recovers her rights over her own life and finds the desire to go out, drink, seduce, dance… When I was working on the chorus, I said to myself: “It’s funny, I’m writing a song about all of us and the situation we are currently living in”. We’re not in a toxic relationship, but we’re locked up for other reasons and we’re all waiting to get our lives back and our freedom back. »
It is therefore somewhat in spite of herself that Clara Luciani captured the spirit of the times and it is undoubtedly this spontaneous, natural inspiration that makes Breathe again an evidence and a song that has already marked our era, giving it a new lease of life.