Pomme puts the women in his life to music in his third album

From singer Barbara to a heroine of Miyazaki, master of Japanese animation: Apple, crowned at the Victoires de la Musique in 2021, signs a third album where “every song or almost is addressed” to a female figure who inspired her.

One of the rare exceptions of Consolationdisc released Friday, August 26, is When I cu (“When I See You” in phonetics, “When I See You”), the only piece in English and a pure folk gem, while elsewhere electro flourishes. This is the song that served to unlock the singer-songwriter, now her own producer.

Because despite the public and critical success that followed Loopholes (her second opus in 2019), the artist found herself confronted with “mini-anxiety attacks” when entering the studio. In her nightmares, the one who is not yet thirty saw “people” who the “watched, arms crossed” for the “judge”as she tells AFP. “I listened to my intuitions to Loopholes and it worked, but it brought me an audience that I didn’t have before, so a source of anxiety for the new album”. Ward off evil by writing it down in English, “to trap” his “brain” tormented, on an intuition of his sound engineer, was liberating.

Taking the diagram of “letters never sent” that she wrote as a child “to free oneself 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 dreamschildhood has not always rhymed with carelessness. “I was very 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 “adversarial relationships” 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 that religion was reluctant towards lesbians or gays, and I thought to myself “if my mother rejects me, it is 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 piece River. Apple had already taken over in Japanese a title from the soundtrack of Spirited Away which had opened the door to benefits in Japan.

The piece B is dedicated to Barbara – “a shock when I was eight years old” – while nelly pays tribute to Nelly Arcan, author from Quebec (where Pomme spends half her time) who committed suicide before her 40th birthday. With his “raw style, no filter”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 synthesized by Apple.

Despite these references, Consolation is nothing weighty and the end of a title like Blue even offers an electro cavalcade – signed by Flavien Berger, craftsman of delicate electro and co-director of the album – which prefigures a new breath on stage.

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