Apple confronts the demons of childhood in the music video for “Garden”

In her latest album, Pomme plunges back into childhood, and more particularly in the clip for “Jardin”, which transcribes the ambivalence of her feelings over this period, both a source of nostalgia and melancholy.

Among her childhood memories, Pomme keeps the unfailing one of this large garden where she loved to play, but also to run away, and of which she made a song, as she recounts in an interview given in the last stubborn·, currently available in newsstands. The singer presents this Wednesday, October 5, the clip that accompanies the soberly titled track “Jardin”, taken from her third album, Consolationreleased on August 26, and whose universe as dreamlike as it is nightmarish seems to come straight out of an animated film by Miyazaki. “This garden often comes up in my dreams, but also in my nightmares”, told us the artist, who perfectly knew how to transcribe the ambiguity of his feelings. The clip is a perfect mix between comfort and discomfort. A hug that sends shivers down your spine.

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— Apple (@Pommeofficial) September 15, 2022

Apple and thechildhood ambivalence

Anyone who has ever watched a horror movie knows this: walking through a maze created in a cornfield is a very bad idea. At the heart of this interweaving, an elderly woman with gray hair, whose progression towards the center of the labyrinth seems to reproduce her mental journey towards buried memories. During her journey, she ends up coming face to face with a child with a familiar face – they have the same scar on the arch – sitting on a bed. Despite the heavy atmosphere that emanates from the scene, the dazzling light and the warm summer colors set it apart from the classics of the macabre. However, the creatures that hide in the ears are not reassuring. If you enjoy Ghibli animated films, you may have recognized the reference to the Kodamas, milky-white forest spirits with ghostly distorted faces, very present in Princess Mononoke. Unlike Miyazaki’s Kodamas, those of “Garden” are more disturbing, and their attitude menacing.

“I miss my childhood, when maybe it shouldn’t.”

Why does the old woman try to follow the trail indicated by these creatures? What is this stubbornness due to? These are exactly the questions that Apple asks in its text: “Why am I still thinking about it? What better way to go?” When we ask her, she admits that her childhood“obsessed”that she “try to [se] remember absolutely everything”. “I miss my childhood, even though it probably shouldn’t”, she says. If the artist cannot help but feel a form of pain at the evocation of his memories, however, on paper, “everything was going”. “It’s this ambivalence, I think, that makes me obsessed with childhood. I stubbornly seek the truth about what it really was,” she analyzes. This quest for truth, for his truth, is precisely at the heart of his clip, whose final harmony is made possible by the reunification of the past, distant and solitary, of the future, which wanders, and of the present determined to bring peace to this garden.

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Photo credit: Claire Pommet and Hugo Pillard