You have more than fifty years of career under your belt. What do you get out of it?
“First of all, a form of wonder, because it is quite extraordinary and rare, to start with your guitar and your little squared notebook to make songs, and find yourself fifty years later with just as much passion and freedom. Especially with an audience still there.”
Is the desire to create and perform on stage the same as when you started out?
“Yes, in fact we could imagine that there is a weariness, a routine, but not at all! I think it’s a bit the opposite, because the more you advance in a career, the more something is expected of you. The requirement is always there, and so we must be demanding of ourselves before imagining surprising the public. So yes, it’s always the same passion, the same desire.”
How does inspiration come to you?
“It is life itself that inspires you, it is a permanent source of inspiration, which places you on the path of events, of emotions, because songs speak to the heart. They are above all emotions. Whether they are committed songs, poetic songs, there is always an emotion at the beginning. That is what inspiration is, it is the emotion of what is happening on the screen of your eyes. You witness moments of tenderness, moments of attack, of war, of fear, fears of illness, the loss of loved ones, events like the fall of the Berlin Wall, or the war in the Middle East… Finally we are constantly confronted with emotions, we live in the midst of these emotions that overwhelm us, so it is a bottomless pit, of bottomless subjects.”
Do all your songs, all your albums, arouse the same emotion in you?
“I would say it’s an evolution. In fact, I’ve never tried to redo what I’ve already done, so I have a particular attachment to each of my albums for different reasons. I don’t have a preference, I have time passing. I’m not used to looking back to see how far we’ve come, I’d rather look in the windshield at what’s ahead of us, rather than in the rearview mirror at what’s already happened.”
Should, or can, a song be more than a song?
“That’s a big question, because a song is a space of freedom. It can be nothing at all, or it can be very heavy. I have in mind the example of “Une noix” by Charles Trenet. Inside a nut you can make a song with that. Or with “Les feuilles mortes qui se ramssent à la pelle”, at the beginning you can’t say that you’re going to make a worldwide success with that! Yet there is a lot of emotion. Or “J’ai la mémoire qui flanche”. Songs that are, to everyone’s surprise, moments of universality. And then you have “Le déserteur”, songs like that that are heavy with meaning, and that also cross time. So in fact a song doesn’t have to be something, but can be anything you want, and it can be as heavy as it is light. It can also be deep as well as superficial, there are no real rules. “Monday in the Sun” is not a very exciting song, but it’s a hit.
What is the most appropriate self-definition for you?
“It’s up to you to say it! Self-description is not a description, we cannot describe ourselves, or we limit ourselves. It is very reductive to try to define ourselves. In define there is finish. It is permanent, it continues. I will not be able to answer this question, I have no self-definition of myself.”
Given the armed conflicts, threats, uncertainties and turpitudes throughout the world, is poetry able to have therapeutic aims?
“Therapeutic is not really the word, but it is the opening of different paths. Art is a path of memory. I will give you just one example. In the history of humanity you have the paintings that describe the great battles of the armies of the great empires, the pompier painting that depicts glorious generals, and then you have impressionism. Impressionism has far exceeded in popularity everything that pompier art has tried to impose on us: violence, wars, blood, glory… Poetry is not a solution, it is something that highlights the deep nature of the human. This deep nature is to be in sharing, solidarity, harmony, respect, and it is everything that today we do not see. It is everything that today’s society offers us that is less beautiful. In respect there is at the same time a demand, an aspiration and a lack. The reality of today’s society is to be violent, indifferent, to punish difference, it is not in our nature. Poetry is not a solution, it comes as an aspiration to share, to a model of life, to a kind of dream, but if there is no one to dream the world of tomorrow, it will look like the worst we see today. Art is not a therapy, it is a necessity.
What a wonderful gift this “Writing Path” is for your fans. Is this the Bible for Duteillophiles?
“Not at all, oh no, I don’t have that pretension. I would never have that pretension of being either a master thinker or a guru. A Bible suggests that there is one who is right, and that he imposes his truth on everyone. For a human, it’s a bit heavy (laughs)! It’s simply a transmission, because one day I won’t be here to transmit my songs. So there will be all the texts in the book “Chemin d’écriture” with explanations from me, of the why or the how of this or that song, of this or that period of writing, of this or that moment or this or that album. And then there will be all the most interesting recordings that we could find on our hard drives, on our computers, in the studios, in the concert halls, in the songs of others that I liked. It’s a journey. We did an exercise this summer that consisted of revisiting all the scores of my songs to be able to share them with anyone who wants to sing or play my songs exactly as I play them on the guitar or piano. It was a huge amount of work, since we revisited more than one hundred and eighty scores, really for the pleasure of transmission.
In Chalon-sur-Saône on October 19, will the night be brighter?
“It’s an acoustic concert, where there will be songs to rediscover, and songs to discover, because I think that the public doesn’t know all my latest songs as well as the old ones. So there’s really everything, it spans my entire career, and the show will indeed have beautiful lights, during which I will alternate on the piano and guitar, with a cello, a bass, and a percussionist. It’s a concert that is really very elaborate musically, but which remains dominated by emotion. So, if you’re talking about light and lights, yes we’re going to try to offer a little light in this world, like a parenthesis. A parenthesis that is not an illusion. It’s a dream, and my favorite phrase is: “We must dream the world more beautiful than it is, so that it becomes so.”
Not all places are taken
Unit price: 39.00 euros. Seated, free placement. Usual rental locations. Information from A Chalon Spectacles ( [email protected] or on 03 85 46 65 89).
Photo credit: DR Comments collected by Michel Poiriault
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