Spread over nine months, until the birth of his first child, September 18, 2023: thirteen songs, an album for a boy. Melodies and words which first traveled, one could say, inside her, in her growing company. The resulting album is titled My blood. Without being bloody. It’s circulating. From generation to generation.
“I started writing this record as soon as I carried life,” she summarizes on screen, during our short videoconference conversation. “And I gave myself this challenge to create a record during the nine months that followed. But what can we say is important, what is essential? To this child in the making, very quickly, I wanted to introduce myself, to say who I was and where I came from. To write My blood. To write My mother. Describe friendly disappointments, broken hearts, but also happy love. I wanted to talk to him about my beginnings in Music. I realized, in fact, that I was touching on a lot of subjects, that I was rummaging in the attic and that I was finding lots of things. »
This album is a marvel. The child too, we say to ourselves a year later. The two, in a way, take us into the movement, draw us all in as much as we are, seized, moved, we who embrace in Clara Luciani the mother her gesture, in all the grandeur of the great young lady of 32 years old.
From grandeur to splendor
Greatness, oh yes. Splendor, even. These songs born guitar-voice could have stayed there, would have been beautiful and complete like this, asked for nothing more a priori, but it happened that they unfolded, that they were filled, infused, until ‘to justify arrangements of a large popular orchestra as was done at the end of the 1960s, with tornadoes of crescendoing strings, choirs, real musical scores for cinema songs. At the first bars of this record, we have the impression of being on a big stage with a Paul Mauriat or a Raymond Lefèvre. We think of From now on of Aznavour, Voilà by Françoise Hardy, Music of Nicoletta, even to theCuddly soul the Polnareff.
“It’s been a journey, this album writing. Nothing was conscious, everything was created little by little. And I was getting rounder little by little. Casually, it became a double gestation. » It was microscopic at first, then as tiny as dust and it became big. The music has grown. An orchestral bias, without really wanting it, and wanting it more and more. “The arrangements came quite naturally. What inspired me the most were my first musical loves, you can hear what I love about the Beatles, these orchestrations where lots of things were happening. »
A family on the roof of the bus
This art of poignant feeling. The chorus of Everything for methe second giant title, is of this magnitude. At times, for example in Too bad, it gushes out, irrepressible pop like McCartney at the most sparkling of the Wings period. The Paul who built his family in the 1970s, with children born between songs and tours, who literally grew up on the roof of a double-decker bus. ” Yes ! The magical Wings bus! It’s truly a career that inspired me. His family life and his professional life are always linked. One of the first things he did when he made some money with the Beatles, McCartney, was give his dad a horse. And after, in Let It Beit’s the image of his mother that comes to him, “mother Mary”. »
“On my album,” she continues, inspired again, “I wanted to write a song about a heartbreak in friendship, because there aren’t many. And when I started thinking about this theme, I found myself listening to a super rare song called Dear Friendwhich McCartney had written to Lennon. Paul McCartney has always been a very strong presence in my life, also because my dad introduced me to the Beatles very early on. My father, who is himself a bassist. Everything fits together and everything responds to each other. » Let’s cite this image in Courage : “I carry my house / On my back / My songs, my child on my back”…
Everything in Clara Luciani turns out to be twofold. The creation of songs and human relationships always go hand in hand. This is true even in the way of rhyming. She has, firmly in her heart, this efficiency in maintaining the balance between pop songs and sometimes difficult themes. “I think it’s always been my big challenge, to maintain this lightness of pop while having subjects that are sometimes serious, sometimes political. This is the case of To grenadesthis is the case of Coeurwhich is a song about femicide while also being a disco song. I never wanted to choose between lively and serious. Perhaps even less on this disc. »
Detecting Clara under Luciani
“Maybe that’s what I am in life.” All the time smiling and laughing, and yet, as soon as I sit down with a friend to talk, there is gravity. Ultimately, I think it’s the same gap in the songs. They look quite similar to me. Yes, I’m cheerful, but when you get to know me, when you really listen and listen to me talk, I think you detect something that isn’t really obvious. » Clara the joy, Clara the scene. And Clara ecstatic: the album ends in pure happiness with Rufus Wainwright.
“It happened by miracle. I wasn’t expecting it anymore. I had sent lots of messages to Rufus, which he had never seen, never read. It was Woodkid who finally put us in touch. I sent the song. Rufus very kindly accepted. He had to go to Paris for his operas, and we managed to meet like that, one afternoon in the studio. I had his voice in my head for months, and to suddenly have it take shape and really exist was super moving for me. »
So here: another guy with a family life very linked to his musical life. There is no coincidence. Born Wainwright and McGarrigle, between each other’s records, it’s his story! “It’s his blood!” » exclaims Clara, too happy with the coincidence not to have wished for it a little.
