“We fell in love with our respective arts”

B.B. I told her very simple words that I would say by few people in life. Those whose music I really appreciate and who are also friends elsewhere. And that are no longer released from albums …

Jc Benjamin touched me because he said to me, “You’re going to redo a disc and I will do it.” Even if I didn’t have the start of a song, he trusted me. It’s rare …

Benjamin, how can you define your role as director and arranger?
B.B. I am a producer, in the Anglo-Saxon sense of the term. I ask myself in the room and I say to Jeanne: “Go ahead, do your thing.” This is the kind of attitude that we can only have with those whose talent is known. Because you can’t imagine that someone has talent, you have to know it….

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Did you intervene on texts, music?
B.B. No, Jeanne did everything alone. Sometimes we discussed a word, an idea. But it is above all his album.

Jeanne, in “Rodrigues”, you praise slowness. What attracts you?
Jc We live in an overconsumption society, where taking your time is not necessarily well seen. However, I need to go backwards our rhythms of life. Especially in my way of getting out of the records. I do one when I have things to say.

With a title like “the mother and the whore”, you say your freedom to be the mother or the lover according to your good will. It is not up to the company to dictate you who you are …
Jc That would be ideal … [Elle rit.]

B.B. Jeanne has always had something social, committed or feminist in her music. “The mom and the whore”, for me, it is not made to put a big slap in the face, but to make people think. The text is so strong that it allows you to be barely interpreted. As in Bossa-Nova or samba, it goes directly to the soul. I just didn’t want her to make a song at Anne Sylvestre …

Jc I never sing with my fist raised, but I get involved in the slightest word. I needed here to talk about the multiple facets of femininity.

You also sing the woman who met the wolves. To dismiss toxic masculinity?
Jc This text did me a lot of good, since it summons all the wolves that I have come across in my life. Modesty prevents me from using the word “predator”, I find it ugly. But we see what it is.

B.B. Animals act to feed or feed their family. Which is not at all the case with “predators”, who are people who have nothing to lose. Take a guy like Frédéric Beigbeder, who makes great statements, “We, men…”. But no one listens anymore. It looks like the expression “ok boomer” was invented for him.

“We vomit every sixty-eighthowed, who have become more and more conservative”

Jeanne, do you feel like men behave differently today?
Jc The men-female report is changing. But the generation before ours is fucked up … On the other hand, I can see that young adults are no longer in the same patterns as us.

B.B. Me, I am not the only father to have a daughter who becomes an actress and who is no longer afraid of sending her to a shoot in the provinces. And if there is a guy who has a slightly borderline behavior, he immediately releases. This is also why we vomit every sixty-eight retarded, which has become more and more conservative. They are the ones who confused sexual liberation and generalized orgy.

Could Benjamin have been able to fall into this toxic masculinity?
B.B. I have always had a line of driving. I have other flaws, but not that one. Yes, I hurt many women. But all that is the prining of the criminal is completely foreign to me. I have never kissed someone by force. And the friends I saw doing this, it went very badly afterwards.

Jeanne, you make “life is a short top” an ode to antidepressants.
Jc I wanted to play down the fact of using this type of treatment. When you have an angina, you take an antibiotic without moods. Unfortunately there is still a taboo with the drugs we take when you are in a faulty mental state. It exists. You might as well take advantage of it if it feels good …

Is the “Fauve en Liberté” that you evoke in “Fouté”, is it for Benjamin?
Jc This is the only song he ordered me, asking me to make a feminine counterpart to the “I made myself very small” of Brassens.

BB but I am not this wild beast!

Maybe that’s what she sees you?
B.B. But I am tamed, me …

Jc In any case, I liked it …

As a singer, I can’t help but approach what makes me want to react.

Janne Chereal

Another daring subject: the vibrator in “Hitachi Magic Wand”. A tribute disguised to Brassens?
B.B. This kind of text is possible thanks to him, since he was the first to talk about what it should not be. But he pushed the thing very far, there are confessions that I find almost annoying, as in “Saturn”, for example, portrait of a man who no longer has libido, who treats pissing girls. We feel there a quasi-decrepitude … He lets himself go to say who he was, without hiding anything. It could make people cringe sometimes. It’s a bit like “Hitachi Magic Wand”.

“Under the roofs” allows you to denounce family violence. While noting that we are often in a dead end.
B.B. But it’s the strict truth! It calls secretaries of state who make videos on Tiktok, but we are very far from a real government action on the subject.

Jc Sexist and sexual violence, domestic violence was supposed to be the great cause of the first five -year term. But nothing has been done. We feel helpless in the face of a political class that seems to take it lightly.

B.B. And Jeanne knows how to do this kind of protest Songs very well. That’s why I wanted it to send steak, that it turns to something funky. This is the lesson I held by Stevie Wonder: when you have things to say, it must be powerful behind.

Do you feel helpless as an artists in the face of nonexistent government decisions? Or are your songs there to advance the cause?
Jc I do not know if it is about something, but in any case, I, as a singer, I cannot do other than to approach what makes me want to react.

B.B. The government is one thing, but the socio-associative environment really exists. There are a lot of people who are fighting for that. There are structures to under surveillance recurrence men because the police do nothing. Do not count on the sub-prefect to say: “I heard a great song by Jeanne Cherhal who denounces what you do.”

Do you believe in useful song?
B.B. Non.

Jc Ah yes, anyway! What are we doing in a demonstration? We sing!

B.B. Yes, but it will never have immediate use. It is something that infuses, on the other hand …

Jc I believe it a lot, just like I believe in the usefulness of films, books. And the intuition of artists.

B.B. The real problem is that the songs committed do not go on the radio. On my latest album, I made a song called “La Traversée”, few people told me about it, it was not broadcast, it has hardly had an echo.

What is for you the last great committed song?
B.B. The whole first album of Angèle.

Jc For me, it’s “Granada”, by Clara Luciani.

B.B. Yes, it’s a bit the same period, it looks pop, it looks tangy, but it sends real messages and it creates vocations.

With “Fail more than you see again”, you find the characters of “Brandt Rhapsodie”, title published in 2009 on “La Superb”, Benjamin’s album. Why this flame return?
B.B. Because it also happens in life. But there I embarked on an interpretation a little sexier than in “Brandt Rhapsodie”. And who took us to something more sexual. But because life is sexual. And then this album could not not talk about ass, since it talked about everything else. But beware, I am not responsible for all the grivoises! It was Jeanne who brought them. I was very respectful. Finally, at the beginning …

Could you have fallen in love with each other?
Jc Of course…

B.B. The things in life have made it happen to us. And then we fell in love with our respective arts.

Jc But that’s also why we are still hanging around fifteen years later. We have the same love of music.

So we find your characters of “you need more than you see again” in fifteen years?
B.B. If God gives us life, of course! [Ils rient.]