Music and transidentity –Elie Zoé: “I reappeared to sing with my new voice”
The artist changed his name in the fall of 2024. For the release of the first extract from his album to be published, he confides in his vocal work and the management of his public image.
Posted today at 7:51 p.m.
It will be necessary to wait until the fall of 2025 to discover the fourth album by Elie Zoé, “Shifting Forms”, which is positioned in the same musical aesthetic as its previous opus.
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- The Romand singer and musician Elie Zoé publicly unveiled his name change at the end of 2024.
- His album “Shifting Forms”, to be published in autumn, explores the relationship to other beings.
- The first single of this opus, “Change My Name”, was released on March 28.
- The writing of new songs helped him shape his voice, now more serious.
He separated from a “Mi”, a note against infinite freedom. Elie Zoé shared her new identity in October 2024 in the lines of «Temps». A sensitive and poignant testimony which marks the culmination of a long process for this multipressed artist of Lausanne origin, better known to the French public under the surname Emilie Zoé.
“I hesitated to abandon my stage name,” recalls the 33 -year -old singer and musician. It has already been several years since I presented myself as a Elia (with a tiny) in my private circle and I was comfortable to dissociate myself from my public character. Until I don’t be anymore. ” Elie Zoé then decides to align his artist’s coat of arms with the first name he has chosen, light alteration and recognizable for his audience.
Singer
Starting a medical transition is seeing your body change, and in the case of Elie Zoé, his voice embracing a more serious tessitura. The voice is precisely the artist’s working tool. “I was on tour for my third album «Hello Future Me» When a friend made me realize that my range had changed, says Elie Zoé. I experienced a kind of adolescence at 30. ”
We are in summer 2023, the singer has just increased his doses of hormones. As the tour progresses, he adapts the tone of his pieces and his guitar strings, up to the limit of their possibilities.
“I thought I would no longer be able to interpret my songs.” The artist cannot trust the memory of his body and abandons fifteen years of habits to relearn everything. The year 2024 is a blank page.
Elie Zoé will announce the dates of her next tour in June.
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Transform pronouns, not the personality
Elie Zoé is exercised to grant the way in which her brain perceives his voice on his fresh range and control the breath that his serious vibrations require. Former memos become new songs and, by dint of trial and error, the musician discovers other ways of composing with his guitar, always companion. The writing of a new repertoire helps him to shape his voice. He even goes in search of a microphone that will do justice to his melodies.
“Transidentity has not changed anything to my songs,” says the artist. I recognize myself in the words I wrote several years ago, because I am still the same person. I simply evolved, as we can do by changing jobs, countries or relationships. ”
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“Unconsciously, I always felt uncomfortable with my voice, dreams of Elie Zoé. I needed to be reassured, to control that I was always singing right. Ditto for my appearance in the photos or in the clips, I attached a lot of importance. But I feel much freer today ”. However, the artist takes a respectful look at whom he was before, for Emilie Zoé, her old voice and her repertoire.
An album to question his relationship to other beings
In addition to the work on the public announcement of its gender transition, the new musical stage of the Lausannois comes to life gently, to the sound of an aesthetic all Elie Zoé: on the border between rock and pop.
A year of writing, composition and recording in the studio which he retapes with his musician friend and co-producer Louis Jucker, in the premises of the Humus Records label in La Chaux-de-Fonds. “This new album called” Shifting Forms “is my favorite, says the artist. He reappeared me to sing. It is not a break with “hello future me”, but its continuity. “
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Released on March 28, “Change My Name” is the first extract from this opus to be published in autumn. “I do not thematize the question of transidentity in my music,” explains the singer, but more broadly our relationship to the living. The militant posture does not correspond to me, I remain an observer. This single addresses the load of words, how they can imprison. Changing a name can transform our perception of something, or someone. ”
A second single will be available on listening platforms from May 23. In June, Elie Zoé will announce the dates of her new tour in Switzerland and beyond, which will start in autumn and will run all 2026.
ISCHI Laurène is a journalist in the Tamedia digital team. After a Bachelor in Letters in Lausanne, she obtained her master’s degree at the Academy of Journalism and the Media from the University of Neuchâtel in 2021. She was passionate about social subjects and worked for “Femina” for 4 years.More info
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