Louis Chedid is this author, composer, performer and writer fed almost intravenously by words. Over time, he was able to combine them to transform them into songs. At his birth, however, in Ismailia in Egypt, nothing could have allowed his poet mother to imagine that he would become a singer-performer and himself a writer, such was the umbilical cord that was wrapped around his neck. had prevented him from screaming and even breathing. Already at the age of five, a classical concert at the Salle Gaveau seemed to have sealed his fate and given him a taste for sound. At the age of 16, he began writing his own texts, and 60 years later, he still handles the pen with the same brilliance. Today he released a new album called Dreamer, dreamerand will be in concert at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord on December 13 and 14.
franceinfo: Are dreams, ultimately, what built a path?
Louis Chedid: Of course. If I hadn't dreamed of a better life after the baccalaureate – the baccalaureate being a step that had to be taken – if I hadn't dreamed for years and years of what I could do later and alongside artist. I also had the vision of my mother who was someone who wrote, and so when I was very little, I said to myself: what is she doing? I didn't understand. She was in her bed with her table tilted a little, her text and then she was correcting her manuscripts. I saw lots of colors, different markers and I said to myself: this is what I want to do when I grow up, I want to stay at home, in my bed, to be free.
The first track which opens the album and which ultimately also closes it since there is a piano voice version, is: Heartbeat. Does that mean the heart has its reasons?
Yes, I think that the emotion, and the love – we must not be afraid of words – that we give to others and that we give to ourselves above all, is to arrive at 'to like. When I was little, I didn't like myself. And then as life goes on, you have to learn to love yourself. That's really the first thing.
“When we love ourselves a little, we look at others and we want to give them feelings, emotions. It’s a job that is really made for that. I feel like I’m serving a purpose. “
Louis Chedidat franceinfo
We feel lighter since the previous album, a piano vocal album, In black and whitewhich came to reinforce something.
I lighten up. So there are a lot of people who think that when you've made a lot of records, you have nothing left to prove, but it's the opposite. The bar is getting higher and higher, it's more and more difficult because we have the background of everything we've done before. We are at the same time quite free of a lot of things that worried us when we started. We wonder if we will still be able to write a song, we are cerebral, we ask ourselves the question, each sentence is analyzed, we waste a lot of time. But at a certain point – at least, this is my experience – we say to ourselves: “I've already done it, I know it's possible, the inspiration never runs out, finally it's obvious and I'm moving forward“.
It's surprising because for a long time, you had difficulty talking about the passage of time because there is always this inevitable path. And when you were little, you had a teacher who traumatized you.
Yes, a French teacher who told me: “Do you think about death?“And I was eight years old. It completely traumatized me because I was like, 'Ah damn, yes, I don't think about it“. At eight years old, it's a bit normal. On the other hand, it must have allowed me to do songs that I might not have done if I didn't think that.
This album sounds terribly like you and the more we advance, the more your albums resemble you. Before, you told us stories that were ours and today, you tell yourself through us.
That's absolutely right. I have a few examples like that. I made a song called Bouc-Bel-Airwhich is a village near Aix-en-Provence where I went when I was little. In all this schooling which was really punishing for me, there were just these three months of vacation where I went to Bouc-Bel-Air and where I felt really happy. So one day, I made an album and this song, and when I came back to Paris, I played it to my producer at the time and I said to him: “well, that only interests mei”. But I remember, there were other people and people were very moved by this song. That day I said to myself:
“The more we look deep within ourselves for very personal things, the more we can be universal because everyone experiences these emotions.”
Louis Chedidat franceinfo
To finish, there is a very strong title called Happiness makes me happy. What is happiness, then?
For me, it's living the way I dreamed of living when I was a teenager and achieving that. It's a luxury in life to be able to live as you dreamed of when you were little, or even to live freely and to be able to do things that you like and not to have that feeling of work, even if you work a lot. .
