“My parents taught me madness and that it was normal to create. It’s a huge privilege when you know that there are others who are told to shut their mouths when they start singing,” admits Zaho de Sagazan. Let’s thank her father and mother for giving her such freedom, because she delivers this Friday The Symphony of Lightningfirst album of thunder, striking down the landscape of French song.
The first three excerpts already let us think a lot of good things about the singer. First there was Enough, beautiful melody with numb melancholy. Then Sleepers evoking, in a swaying rhythm, the phenomenon of influence. And, more recently, the very embodied and contemporary Sadness, to the striking clip. Zaho de Sagazan has something to impress.
We meet her, at the beginning of March, in a café in the 11th arrondissement of Paris. Blonde square on a loose immaculate vintage blouse, she is in the middle of a photo shoot. The photographer makes him take sometimes acrobatic poses. Sitting, one leg outstretched against a pillar, she is amused, ironic: “It feels very natural! “The result will be far from ridiculous: she is photogenic, she has dog. We would forget that she is “only” 23 years old. His hoarse but charming voice in the ear seems to have lived several lives in advance.
“At 13, I discovered boredom”
The interview begins and she immediately abandons herself to spontaneity, passing without warning from seriousness to lightness, and vice versa. To the question, “How would you introduce yourself?” », she unfolds, prolifically, her childhood and her encounter with music. A long answer that she managed to condense in three minutes in the song The Symphony of Lightning. “I managed to describe the release I felt when I realized that all I hated about myself, this oversensitivity, was my strength. »
In front of the dictaphone, she recounts her childhood in Saint-Nazaire (Loire-Atlantique) in a large family, surrounded by four sisters, including a twin. “These were very happy years, but I was screaming, I was crying a lot,” she says. I have always been very sensitive. The day her elders left the cocoon of the smala was a turning point. The constant hubbub was gone. She says: “At 13, I discovered boredom. Only my twin remained. She was drawing, it didn’t make much noise. »
His salvation will come from a “completely out of tune” piano, left by one of his sisters. “I was then a fan of Tom Odell’s music. I wanted to resume Can’t Pretend whose chords I had found on the Internet. I tried to play and I realized that I had hit something important. An hour and a half had passed but I had the impression that only ten minutes had passed and I wanted to continue another hour and a half. I then became the little girl you no longer see and who spends her time in this unheated room, where no one came to disturb me. I was able to sing loudly, shout, experiment, discover my voice. She kept this attachment to the instrument. She systematically creates a piece in piano-voice – “I assume that a song should be enough for that. Then I start to dress her. »
“My mother taught me the sense of humanity and my father the concept of work”
His mother, a teacher, made him discover the French song. “She is a great writer, she introduced me to Barbara – who could sometimes kill me because she managed to sum up a strong and important emotion in four sentences. My mother also taught me the sense of the human being by making me understand that, in others, there is always something good, ”she says. His father, Olivier, is a visual artist – in 2012, in the clip ofIn the shade by Mylène Farmer, he showed his transfigurations to the general public. “He taught me the notion of work, that talent doesn’t just happen and encouraged me not to make any concessions, not to be in the codes”, she notes, grateful.
As a teenager, Zaho de Sagazan discovered “a great passion” for words. “Writing songs offered me the possibility of choosing them, of saying: ‘it will be them that we will hear and no others.’ It’s also as if putting the words that were in my head allowed me to solve my problems and make myself better understood by others. »
Appears an obsession: telling stories in music. She opens an Instagram account where she posts creations for her friends who “love” and encourage her to continue. “At that time, we could only make 15-second videos. So I had to make sure that, in this short duration, something interesting happened, especially in words. That’s how I learned the principle of the chorus,” she explains.
Parental iPad in hand, she is enthusiastic about generating melodies on Garage Band. His Insta posts are becoming more and more professional. “I started having fun with the image, putting the light on one side, my head on another. This face that I hated at the time because I had very little self-confidence. The only place I felt good was in the music. »
“German or Russian stuff with 30,000 plays on Spotify”
As time goes on, his posts on Instagram become more and more popular. “I worked on my songs while posting my little videos, it allowed me to get feedback from people. I got scouted and got opening acts [notamment celles d’Hervé, Mansfield.TYA, elle assure également en ce moment celles de Stromae] through this social network. I built my whole team like that. »
His meeting with Pierre Cheguillaume and Alexis Delong from the Nantes group Inuït was decisive. That was three and a half years ago. “The agreement was immediate. We started making music, they thought I wanted something pop, I told them what I liked was horror movie soundtracks, synths, Kraftwerk…” She admits that if she talks a lot about French songs in interviews, what she listens to on a daily basis is above all “German or Russian stuff with 30,000 plays on Spotify, synths dark. This influence is felt in the album. Imagine Barbara’s raw soul resurrecting and soaring in a Berlin club.
Zaho de Sagazan is aware of some of her contradictions. She accepts them. “I’m very much in the projection, in what I want to become, I blame myself for a lot of things. Among other things, my relationship with Instagram, which is a social network that I love and has taught me and allowed a lot of things, she says. But, indeed, there is the relationship to likes. Today, having 3,000 likes doesn’t do much for me, before, having 100, I thought it was incredible. Everything is a little less dense, I find that sad. “She continues:” I also waste time watching the lives of others who are not so interesting, should not be abused. Sometimes I do stories and I tell myself that I’m getting into this dynamic that I don’t like. No one cares about my life either. »
“There is nothing more beautiful than someone who does not look at himself”
She thus takes care in these texts not to fall into narcissism. “There is a universality in the emotions, which I try to transcribe in my songs. In My body, for example, I do not speak explicitly of the 15 kg that I gained, because I know that people hate themselves because they think they are too thin or because they have acne,” she points out. His wish is that everyone recognizes himself.
The song that closes the album, don’t look at you, takes the same path. If it begins in a very personal way, the chorus sounds like an address to the audience, like advice given. “There is nothing more beautiful than someone who does not look at himself, who does not care what he looks like and who just lives, pleads the artist. We are a generation that looks at itself, that takes more time to take care of its image than to ensure what it really is. »
She returns, at the end of the interview, to this ultimate song. “We also live in a time when we look at others a lot. There is a lot of judgment. I can no longer hear the very common expression, “She’s annoying”. It’s a word I can’t stand anymore. I want to say: “You’re the annoying one, my poor girl, to be embarrassed for nothing.” Don’t mind that, be free!” It’s time to listen, in every sense of the word, to Zaho de Sagazan.