He’s hitting the Olympia and has just received three nominations for the Victoires de la Musique, she’s filling the Zéniths. Alyocha Schneider and his girlfriend Charlotte Cardin are currently experiencing improbable simultaneous success in France.
“We realize that it doesn’t make sense,” says Alyosha Schneider, smiling, joined by Zoom in Paris.
On Tuesday, we learned that he was in the running in the Song of the Year, Male Revelation and Male Revelation categories at the equivalent of our ADISQ Gala.
“The label had entered me in three categories. I was crossing my fingers to get one, but I really didn’t expect three.”
A few weeks ago, the couple crowned a year full of success by offering an extraordinary double bill in two legendary venues in the City of Lights.
“I did the Olympia on December 5, then the next day, completely by chance, she did the Zénith. We sang together both evenings. She sang with Patrick Watson, there was Angèle who arrived, Maro, all artists that I admire. Me, at the Olympia, I sang with my brothers. These are truly unforgettable moments.”
Deep in private life
Alyocha Schneider can say thank you to his producer, Marc-André Gilbert. It was thanks to his stubbornness that he recorded Ensemblethe song that made him a star in France.
“I resisted,” he admits.
The song was born just before he went into exile for six months to film the series Greek saladin Greece, far from his girlfriend.
-“It’s a song about long-distance relationships, something I was clearly experiencing at the time. Marc-André pushed me to go directly into what I was experiencing. Usually, I like to stay vague enough so that it’s not a diary, but here I decided to go deep into my private life.
“Also,” he adds, “it’s a ballad. In France, radios are very formatted. If there is not between 110 and 120 BPM with a kick all the time, it’s a bit complicated. I had a hard time seeing this song as a big singlebut there is something that happened naturally.”
French made the difference
Ensemble eventually became a major radio hit and was even used in an advertising campaign for the Société nationale des chemins de fer (SNCF). “Very good visibility,” recognizes Alyosha Schneider.
According to him, his decision to drop the English from his first albums to sing in French on his third disc, released in 2023, was crucial.
“The change was immediate,” he says, explaining that previously he had difficulty singing in French because he was very influenced by American folk.
“I found it difficult to render it in French. It was more work, I had to relearn all the writing codes, but once I succeeded, I felt like I had something unique in my hands, something that could be hear less in French. Maybe that was my strength in the end.”
Publicized couple
Unsurprisingly, his relationship with Charlotte Cardin piqued the curiosity of the French celebrity press, always fond of love affairs between stars. Strongly solicited by the media, the couple agreed to an appearance on TV, the day before the unveiling of the Victory nominations.
However, they will not make it a habit.
“We said to ourselves, we’ll make a television show and that’ll be it, because we don’t want to play too much on that. We each have our careers. But the media sure like it.”
