With an open heart, singer Amir tells AFP how his new album “C Amir” served as a “personal diary” to externalize his “rage” and the “immense pain” linked to the inconsolable loss of his mother.
Available since September 13, this fourth opus by the 40-year-old Franco-Israeli singer is presented as an introspective and cathartic work, the most personal of the artist revealed by the talent show The Voice in 2014 and Eurovision in 2016.
Question: Why is “C Amir” of particular importance to you?
Answer: “It makes me dive back into a strong emotional intensity. It’s an album born from a real urgency and a desire to write and go through a stage of externalizing a lot of things that have accumulated over the course of about two and a half years, where I deliberately didn’t write anything even though it’s my passion.”
Q: What had driven you so far away from writing?
A: “In July 2021, people began to suspect health problems in my mother and, in August 2021, the axe fell. My father, himself a radiologist, confirmed the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer to his own wife. I lost my uncle and grandmother to pancreatic cancer, we knew the verdict. We just wondered how long and what we could do to extend this time.
So I found myself with the rest of the family in an emotional, intense whirlwind, which I personally translated into endless actions of research, of making contacts. It was a kind of tunnel where music no longer had much of a place. I didn’t even listen to it, in fact. I dedicated myself to my mother and it lasted 20 months. After 20 months, life changes.”
Q: How did you manage to reconnect with music?
A: “Nine months later, I understand that as an artist, I also need to express myself through this prism to get better. As soon as we started working, it was an explosion, a highway. It was so necessary for me, it was an abscess that I was bursting.”
Q: Your writing camp with friends was supposed to start on October 8, 2023, the day after the Hamas attack on Israel followed by the war in Gaza…
A: “We met on October 8 and adjourned on October 9. We were pretty unanimous (in saying) that it was not the right time.
This theme was an obvious part of the topics we were going to discuss in this album (the song “Supernova”, editor’s note) because we had all experienced it together. Regardless of religions, origins and political sensitivities, the shock was there for everyone and everyone found it necessary to add it to the personal diary that is this album.”
Q: As for “Sommet”, a song released in May, it was the official anthem of France Télévisions for the Paris Olympics. What were you thinking when you composed it?
A: “The title is associated with this huge event, its exploits, so many things that I was very far from imagining when we wrote it. We were in the middle of writing the album. It seems quite big to suddenly take back this light and this interest of the people. And I said: +come on guys, let’s make a song that has a kind of war cry+! I want to believe in it through a song that makes me believe in it.”
Q: What does this new album represent, ultimately?
A: “It’s as if I had simply written a report of my therapy through twelve songs that tell all the stages, with the great moments of distress and the great moments of happiness and relaxation. The album was largely what reconciled me with this new reality, which allowed me to accept it, to express my rage, my immense pain, my lack, to scream at my mother what is happening to me and how much I need her. Everything I went through by keeping my mouth shut, the album allowed me to say it.”
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