Apple puts the women in his life to music

One of the rare exceptions of "Consolation", a disc released this Friday, is "When I c u" ("When I see you" in phonetics, "When I see you"), the only piece in English and a pure folk gem while elsewhere the electro flush. This is the song that served to unlock the singer-songwriter, now her own producer.

Because despite the public and critical success that followed "The Flaws" (her second opus in 2019), the artist found herself faced with "mini-anxiety attacks" when entering the studio.

In her nightmares, the one who is not yet thirty saw "people" who "looked at her, arms crossed" to "judge" her, as she tells AFP. "I listened to my intuitions for Les Failles and it worked, but it brought me an audience that I didn't have before, so a source of anxiety for the new album". To ward off evil by writing it down on paper in English, "to trap" his tormented "brain", on an intuition of his sound engineer, was liberating.

Taking up the pattern of "letters never sent" that she wrote as a child "to free herself from certain things", her bewitching voice now serves songs addressed to women who matter, real or fictitious, rubbed shoulders or not.

Because as we feel in the titles "Garden" and "In my dreams", childhood has not always rhymed with carelessness. "I was super melancholy, sad, a child quite difficult to understand, I didn't feel like I was in the right family for example," she begins.

- "Like an anomaly" -

"When I found out I liked girls, I realized that's why I felt like an anomaly before, that I didn't feel like my girlfriends."

Today the "conflicting relations" with brother, sisters and parents are appeased. "I wanted to look like you then I hated you", she sings in the introduction of "In my dreams". "I'm talking about my mother, she confides. I admired her, but she was very Christian and this religion was reluctant vis-à-vis lesbians or gays, and I thought to myself if my mother rejects me, this It's not possible to love her. She's smart, she'll understand that part of the song," she explains.

In an interview, the artist today thanks his mother for having introduced his children to the cartoons of the Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki, which were full of powerful women long before this term existed. One of them, Chihiro, is also mentioned in the track "La rivière". Apple had already taken over in Japanese a title from the soundtrack of "Spirited Away", which had opened the door to performances in Japan.

The track "B" is dedicated to Barbara - "a shock when I was eight" - while "Nelly" pays tribute to Nelly Arcan, an author from Quebec (where Pomme spends half her time) who committed suicide before his 40th birthday. With her "raw, unfiltered style", this woman of letters wrote about her sexuality, "obsessed with the gaze of men, yielding to cosmetic surgery, which at the same time destroyed her", as Apple summarizes.

Despite these references, "Consolation" has nothing compelling and the end of a title like "Bleu" even offers an electro cavalcade -- signed by Flavien Berger, craftsman of delicate electro and co-director of the album -- which foreshadows a new lease of life on stage.