Juliette Armanet: "I have the desires of couple, children, which I have to reconcile with my life as a sailbox"
She tumbles into the hotel room planned for the photo shoot, a small feverish bird wrapped in an XXL Isabel Marant coat.A funny or friendly word for everyone, Juliette Armanet, 33, has the art of being immediately engaging and familiar, as if it was our "girlfriend", - title of her first album - forever.It's a little true, since his tender, sincere, romantic songs, have been accompanying our daily life and that of his many fans who acclaim his concerts, concentrated with glittery joy and sweet melancholy for a year for a year and sweet.Named to the Victoires de la Musique in the Revelation album category, this native of Lille also sang in front of Barack Obama during her visit to France a sexy cover and olé olé du "I Feel It Coming", Daft Punk and The Weeknd, renamedby she..."I feel you coming".Inflated, Armanet.Maintenance.
SHE.For this photo shoot, you only chose fairly sober outfits.Vade retro, printed?
Juliette Armanet.I am not very lady gaga stylistically speaking.I am too complexed.Suddenly, I only put on united and unisex stuff.
SHE.Complexed by what?
Juliette Armanet.My size: 1.58 meters or my three hairs on the pebble.Too female clothes, it stresses me.Today, I have heels, but, usually, I never wear it.I like to be able to run, dance, walk.
SHE.Well, Obama, are we talking about it?
Juliette Armanet.I found it incredibly charismatic, I did not expect it to be so much.We met, greeted, kissed.Finally, kissed with the hands, under the worried gaze of a dozen bodyguards.It was especially sad to say that America no longer looks like that.But now, Obama, it's done!Strongly Putin!I laugh, I'm not going to specialize in the heads of state, it's not my niche.
SHE.How do you live your success?
Juliette Armanet.It took time to settle, it's reassuring, it doesn't make too much straw.Afterwards, it's absolutely great to arrive in the provinces, or abroad, and to have almost complete rooms.It gives a strength, you don't tell yourself that you did 3500 kilometers for nothing.Because the tours are very tiring.I am an old lady, I am 33 years old, not 20.
SHE.Does that make a difference?
Juliette Armanet.Yes, at my age, you don't expect the same thing for a tour as when you are 20 years old, you drink every night or go out with lots of guys.The important thing is that it remains light, that this success is not too crushing.I have a life, an intimacy, I don't want to put it in jeopardy.I am not a sacrificial musician with the teeth who stride the parquet floor.
SHE.You are not Céline Dion in short.
Juliette Armanet.It has to stay on a human scale, simple, soft and funny.Starization scares me, it is quickly the roller coaster.One day, adored, the next day, badly welcomed.In any case, I saw this tour super well, there have been sublime moments, beautiful meetings with the public, and I perfected myself seriously.
SHE.On stage, you have a real talent to enter.Is that your repressed actress side?
Juliette Armanet.Maybe.I love it, I have fun.I who am a great melancholy, an anxious, that is to say both in love with the past and anxious of the future - a dreadful observation - on stage, I am in the present moment.It's calming.
SHE.Did you expect it?
Juliette Armanet.No, I was afraid of losing something sensitive and deep when leaving the piano-voice.One elegance too.And now I love traveling ten in a van that smells of feet and where we go on zero jokes.There is a caravan side, "Mnouchkin" to leave with his glitter curtain conquer the rooms.Because nothing is acquired, never.We no longer sell millions of albums as in the 70s, sitting sitting in front of his beer.We really have to fight with the sweat of your forehead.And you have to be as good, as brilliant, as funny in a small room at the bottom of Mulhouse as in front of the Parisian gratin.The desire to give everything, to share, each evening, with the public must be very strong, so that in return it has desire for you.Otherwise, it can be very sad and very empty.Because you barely see the cities where you play, you wander in more or less welcoming lodges.You really have to be inhabited.
© Thomas Laisné
SHE.Has this new life changed to you?
Juliette Armanet.We become addicted to adrenaline that we generate.We live several days in one, and it necessarily changes its relationship to excitement, to its emotional gluttony.
SHE.Does it cut those around him?
Juliette Armanet.No, but there is a balance, a personal feng shui to find between normal life and life where ten thousand things are going on.
SHE.In your opinion, why do your songs have such a resonance?Would France be in "lack of love"?
Juliette Armanet. Je n'aurais pas la prétention de dire ça.It's mysterious.Maybe y a-t-il un peu de cette « Ultra moderne solitude » dont parlait Souchon.Social networks have changed a lot to human relationships.And then my songs are with rose water.Their theme is unifying: everyone had a broken heart or broke someone's heart.
SHE.Precisely, they are quite first degree when, in life, you are rather second degree...
Juliette Armanet.These are sincere, romantic songs, real emotions of the heart.Fortunately there is something first degree!There was even one at Bashung, the king of the hidden joke and the pun.To touch, the song must start from a real emotion.
SHE.Do you recognize yourself in the new representations of femininity and masculinity that Eddy de Pretto and Christine and the Queens are singing or are you more stated?
Juliette Armanet.It's a good question.I hope to represent a fairly modern femininity in the sense that I am not trying to be feminine.Rather to be myself.And I recognize myself in their refusal of an identity standard, a suffering expressed in relation to the challenges of love, the couple, hetero or homo.But I express it in a more classic way.Christine and the Queens, she brought unheard of.This is not necessarily my case, which does not bother me.But these questions do all my torment, even if I evoke them less in my texts.
SHE.Your torment, downright?
Juliette Armanet.These are the challenges of a 30 -year -old woman today.Thanks to our mothers and grandmothers who fought for the emancipation of women, we end up with enormous social gains.But also with the bizarre feeling of having inherited a freedom that we have not won over and that we are damaged.What do we do with this freedom?Am I a feminist?Without a doubt.But I have the desires of a couple, of children, that I have to reconcile with my life as a sailboat.With my friends, we chat until dawn on what it means, to make a child, to have a man in his life...What is still meaningless for us?
SHE.Are you torn between new models and old ones?
Juliette Armanet. Oui, perdue entre le schéma tablier vichy-tarte aux pommes de Maman et celui de la femme guerrière que j'estime assez cliché.We must find an in-between that looks like us, a free field to invent.We also have our own shots on ourselves as women.I have been single for years.And I don't know if I have suffered from the eyes of others more or from being really alone.On Sundays with parents or social gaze, I have often experienced it as something painful.While I was like full of people aged 25-30 who have fun and have not yet found the person with whom to make their lives.Women with each other can be hard enough.I resolve this conflict by making music.It is for me an absolute land of freedom.This is why I am quite painful on these stories of styling because I do not want to be too woman, nor too man, I want to wear something that can let me dream about myself.For me, Françoise Sagan is one of the women who had managed the most to free themselves from these diktats, who thought above all as an individual.
SHE.Today with the #Meetoo and #BalanceTonPorc, the debate has opened...
Juliette Armanet.Many women are against #BalanceTonPorc, then, if they do not agree on how to speak on these problems, it becomes very complicated.Marina Foïs said: It's crazy, we are still waiting for elegance from women victims of harassment!Faced with violence, you have to be a little violent.
SHE.Do you think men are ripe to change?
Juliette Armanet.In any case, the song by Eddy de Pretto is beautiful for this reason: the liberation of women must be perceived by men as a chance to reinvent themselves.This new female identity is disturbing, but this is an opportunity to create a new way of loving yourself, looking at yourself, listening, living in our sexual identities.We are a guinea pig generation, hinge and necessarily, this disorder is both confusing and exhilarating.But don't be afraid of it.
SHE.Hence your album placed under the sign of love, which reconciles everyone...
Juliette Armanet.At no time do I feel the war of the sexes.At home, there is zero hatred of men.Love remains the most beautiful thing that can happen between a man and a woman, two women or two men.We cannot talk about anything other than love...
SHE.Or Barack Obama...
Juliette Armanet.Of course.
"Girlfriend" (Barclay). En concert les 6 et 7 mars à l'Olympia, Paris-9 e .
This article was published in ELL magazine on February 09, 2018.Subscribe here.
