BARBARA CARLOTTI - Rennes

Krumpp Music and Halo present, in agreement with W Spectacle

BARBARA CARLOTTI

Some songs were meant to exist. Better yet, to save us—if not our lives, at least our faith in them. Such is the case with every song on Chéris ton futur!, which, while the Sex Pistols proclaimed there was no future, draw from a rock-and-pop soil to prove otherwise.

"What must we do to cherish our future?" wonders Barbara Carlotti. "We must find a perspective, question the burdensome patriarchal baggage, reinvent love, and build a revolutionary context." Following Magnétique (2018), an escape from reality through dreams, and the familial, almost affectionate record Corse île d’amour (2020), Chéris ton futur confronts us with reality as an antidote to a present that is far too violent. During the lockdowns, the singer realized, like many others, the fragility of her profession: "something that destabilized me in many areas, including unexpected ones."

So Barbara decided to give free rein to the exaltation of feelings, for an album she wanted to be galvanizing, like a breath of hope. She "rolls around in music," because that is where the light appears to her, and after months of Covid-induced solitude, she surrounded herself with an enthusiastic team. She cultivates her love for French pop here with a new partner in crime, Maxime Daoud (Ojard), arranger and co-producer of the album. He has a gift for evolving harmonies, striving for a better sound, and translating Barbara's musical colors. Together, they craft these ten songs of somewhat wild elegance, allergic to morality, curious about everything and above all about the unknown—as evidenced by the self-titled track shared with her friend Philippe Katerine. The rhythm sections were recorded live at Bastien Doremus's studio in just a few takes. "Maximum efficiency," Barbara emphasizes. Maxime called upon a team he knows well: Louis Delorme (drums), Adrian Eudeline (guitar), Corentin Kerdraon (piano), Adrien Soleiman (saxophones), and David Numwami (guitar, vocals). As for the mixing, it was handled by Bertrand Fresel, who previously worked on L’amour, l’argent, le vent—the superb ancestor of Chéris ton futur.

Another partner: Rome. During a residency at the Villa Medici in 2021, Barbara set up a home studio in her room. She fully embraced the ghosts of a city inhabited by cinema while revisiting her own demons and painful past loves in light of that era. "With computers and phones, we have a greater awareness of the world around us," she explains. "We are convalescents, recovering from Covid but also from those awful news stories that keep crashing down on us from near and far." Humanity is "Convalescing" then, as one of the songs on Chéris ton futur! announces, refusing to miss out on succumbing to the beauty of a moment ("Le Syndrome de Stendhal"), nor holding back from getting a sweet revenge with "Désert dévorant," while "Parle" confronts us with our own ambiguities. "We must reconsider our past to do better in the future and take good care of our style," Barbara smiles, for whom content and form are one: "Love is not a trite space; we must make its image more powerful." This gives the record a philosophical character, even existential since it deals with life, death, and love—always Barbara's anchoring point.

Backing vocals, guitars... everything comes together to foster an uninhibited, ultra-contemporary, multi-referential lyricism. In Barbara Carlotti's bag of tricks: Blondie, LCD Soundsystem (special mention to the drum machine on "Dance Yrself Clean"), the Stooges (full throttle on "Chéris ton futur"), Marianne Faithfull, Talking Heads, David Bowie (seventies organic rock version), the Velvet Underground, as well as Etienne Daho, Telex, and Hubert Lenoir on the Francophone side. At last but not least, Laurie Ander