The last time Michel Fugain released an album was more than ten years ago, in 2013. With the musical group Pluribus, he offered a mixture of revisited classics and new songs. Last Friday, the singer released his 22nd studio album, titled “Life, love, etc.“. Ten original songs for which he took up the pen and worked with “his band”, the musicians of his show. “Everyone pitched in“, he said.
Long a composer and melodist of his songs, he has also been the author of the texts for several years. “I don’t know if I’m experienced, but I love it, I love the work that it involves, and especially the magnificent moments when we look for the right rhyme“, says Michel Fugain. “This implies not to fail, that the words are musical, that the idea passes quickly, because there are not that many words in a song“, he underlines, he who writes first the music and then the text.
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Lecture listen 55 min
“The songs of hope cannot be silenced”
“Life, love, etc..” sweeps the 82-year-old singer’s gaze over the world around him. There is something familiar in these songs, as if from the first listen, we recognize that we are in Michel Fugain – and the first track of the album, “La rue du temps qui passe”, is a good example of this, where we have the impression that the feeling of nostalgia that emerges from it emanates as much from the music as from the text: “I see the melody as a poem in notes. The song is perfectly successful when the poem in words fits together: if the poem is beautiful and the melody that fits together is also beautiful, then the song is successful“.
“This song was inspired by an ad that moved me“, he smiled, “an insurance ad in which we saw generations succeeding one another in a street. I am very sensitive to the work of successive generations. There is love, it’s almost an image from Epinal, we completely agree.”
Listen to the interview with Michel Fugain in long version
16 min
A bridge between old and new songs
As he prepares to return to the stage in Paris at the beginning of 2025, every Monday in January at Bobino, he prepares a dialogue between his standards, such as “Bravo monsieur le monde”, which he created in 1973, and his new songs, like “Cool Cool”, which revolves around the idea of men staying “cool before the boat sinks”: “Do you realize that 50 years after this song, we still have the same problem? And worse, we fracture the soil to get gas, we damage it even more. Are we stupid? What is the justification for these 50 years where we continue to damage?” exclaims Michel Fugain, who places the question of the planet, recurring in his discography, as a capital subject: “I deeply love our planet, I love humanity, I am not crazy about men as they are“.
But throughout the album, and more generally throughout all his work, he assures, there remains hope, or even a form of hope, he prefers to say; this is summed up in the final song of the album, “Why I sing”: “In everything I have done, there is always a song of hope, hope always remains, to change disappointment into hope (…). The songs of hope that have existed, that will still exist, in any war, in any struggle, we cannot silence them, they are the bearers of a tomorrow.”
