“If we had wanted to tour [pour Saisons] Strictly speaking, we would have had to hire like 18 classical musicians and, financially, it was impossible,” says Claire Pommet, her real name.
Even if the tour of Consolation has never stopped, the show that Pomme is presenting at the Imperial Bell this Sunday has evolved greatly since 2022. It has been enriched with new compositions, the arrival of a new drummer and continues to transform according to the contexts in which the artist plays and according to the desires of the latter.
Exactly. Last fall, the Frenchwoman wanted to embrace more rock sounds.
“I started screaming and got nodules in my vocal cords.”
— Claire Pommet, aka Pomme.
“I’m glad I realized it early enough, because it’s the kind of thing where you either manage to resolve it through vocal rest and speech therapy, or you have to have surgery and that’s not the case. it’s not super fun», Explains the 27-year-old singer-songwriter.
At the beginning of the year, the singer gave concerts during which she did not have all her abilities and was looking for the origin of her voice problems. So, she is partly relieved to have the facts right.
“I know there are ways to make them go away. Normally, you really need total vocal rest, which I don’t really have, but I’m quite confident. In any case, the speech therapist, the phoniatrist and everyone tell me that it hasn’t gotten worse at all,” declares the artist who begins a North American tour this Sunday.
Pomme, who has lived between France and Quebec for around ten years, has never played in English Canada. His concert in Toronto on June 10 will be his first. Then, after a performance at the Francos in Montreal on June 16, she will head to the United States where she has only performed twice before.
“There are cities I’ve never been to! There are around ten dates,” enthuses Claire Pommet.
The Frenchwoman will juggle three show formats during this period. In Quebec, she will be accompanied by the string quartet Mommies on the run. In Montreal, the group with whom she plays in France will join her. Finally, for her first official tour in the United States, she presents in a guitar-vocal format before going to end the summer in the festivals of her native land.
Hyperactive
Clearly, Pomme will offer little rest to his vocal cords this summer and that’s not insignificant…
“I discovered, in January, that I had a hyperactivity disorder,” announces Claire Pommet.
This character trait had never been questioned or questioned, because this hyperactivity is somehow valued in the industry in which it operates.
“I felt that I was physically and psychologically incapable of coping with inactivity, which was becoming problematic for my vocal cords and I was also extremely ill between 2021 and 2023, I had 6 to 7 flus per year” , explains the artist who wanted to check if she did not have a neurological disorder.
“Hyperactivity means that I am able to do a lot of different projects, to be creative, it pushes me in life, but it is also what limits me in my relationship to my physical health: I am not not able to stop if I’m not sick or if I don’t have a problem that forces me to stop.”
— Claire Pommet, aka Pomme
All the same, it is heading towards a much calmer year 2025.
Music break, but…
For the first time in ten years, no albums and no tours are planned on her schedule in 2025. However, Claire Pommet hopes to continue her exploration of the 7th art.
Recently she had a small role in a small production which will probably be released next year.
“In 2025, I would like to act in a slightly bigger film like I did [pour La Vénus d’argent] with a role that takes more time,” mentions the one who received several proposals.
Additionally, she notes that her experience in front of the camera had an influence on her stage presence.
“Even if the stage is a place where I have always felt good, I find it very difficult not to look at myself, to detach myself from this need to control what I look like,” admits Pomme.
“In the cinema, you are watched all the time, but you have to be in a form of letting go, because otherwise it shows. You’re filmed so close you can’t lie. In any case, I wasn’t able to,” she explains.
During the tour that began after filming, the Frenchwoman felt freer on stage. The composer of I don’t know how to dance moves a lot more than before.
“In fact, I always had an instrument, my guitar or my piano, as an excuse to be super static,” she confides.
In her show, she has now planned moments where she does not have any instruments and where she sometimes dares to dance and even make the audience dance.
“I think it’s the beginning of my path, that I opened a door,” she adds.
Decentralized creation
By producing his fourth album, Pomme indeed seems to be taking a new step in his career.
In addition to questioning her “extreme productivity,” the singer-songwriter no longer feels the need to be at the center of her creation. Taking inspiration from the seasons, she wanted to become part of the decor rather than being the heroine of this project.
Moreover, Claire Pommet opted for a collaborative approach for the production of Seasons. In addition to being in harmony with her new decentralized vision of creation, she needed a helping hand to write the orchestral scores and make the arrangements for this album of rather classical music which is inspired by the codes of opera.
She notably called on Malvina Meinier, a French artist who is a conductor and pianist in addition to leading an electro-punk music project. She signed the arrangements for the concert presented in quartet format at the Imperial Bell in Quebec on June 9.
