Shortly before the Covid-19 pandemic, Editions Favre contacted Phanee de Pool to publish his song lyrics, but in a personal form. She tried, screwed up a lot, gave up. Before the publishers relaunched it.
And suddenly, “I wrote everything by hand, straight to the point, without embellishments”, continues the 35-year-old singer, first “on a paper packaging of kibble for my dog”. The native of Bévilard has thus piled up miles of thoughts, anecdotes, rages, joys, “a veritable grimoire”. “I am incapable of doing something that fits into the codes,” she notes, evoking a sometimes raw, authentic, everyday language.
Psychoanalysis and liberation
The logbook, which also contains sketches, drawings from his personal notebooks, photos and the texts of his songs, is ultimately a look back at the story that led to the “character” Phanee de Pool. “A career is born, it evolves,” says the singer, who believes that there are not many differences between herself and her stage character.
On the other hand, compared to her musical work, the creation of the book was more spontaneous, believes Fanny Diercksen. It allowed him to relive many things in a more personal way: his adolescent unhappiness, his academic failures, his choices, his time spent in the police for several years, the start of his artistic career.
Where her songs tell stories that are sometimes more distant, “the fact of writing this book clearly liberated me, there was a taste of psychoanalysis”. She embarked on the adventure without a real model or displayed literary references. “I have cultural gaps,” she smiles, displaying a passion for dictionaries, as well as “old things”, but without necessarily wanting to know the history that accompanies them. “I love the past by living it in the present.” At most, she notes “small similarities” with the work of French singer Philippe Katerine, whose book “Doublez votre memoire”, released in 2007, accompanied her for a long time.
The pride of the Brassens trophy
In love with words and the French language, Phanee de Pool does not hide her pride in having won the Georges Brassens Trophy in June 2024, awarded in Sète (F), homeland of the French singer-songwriter. “Being the first Swiss woman to win this competition, that’s it!” The Bernoise, who readily calls herself “conservative” in her musical tastes, especially has boundless admiration for the author-composer and singer Barbara. Beyond the artist, it is the “character” that she loves.
Just like that of Henri Dés, “the first singer I adored”, and with whom she made a beautiful duet on the track “Dites Henri”, published on her third album Algorythme (2023). After a busy period of creations, tours and awards, Phanee de Pool admits to not composing music at the moment. But she does not fear the blank page syndrome at all: “there is no anxiety, we are not machines.” While waiting for the Swiss release of her book on November 7, then international on the 14 November (France, Belgium and Canada), the author and singer dreams of a future film project, “something perky, not within the norms”, obviously.
