INTERVIEW. Three years after “Braquage”, the French singer Marie-Flore unveils the single “I know it’s late”, the last taste of her upcoming album, “I don’t know if it’s okay”.
“I know there are happy sorrows and sad joys”, sings Marie-Flore in her new single, I know it’s late released this Thursday, April 28 and accompanied by its clip, directed by Ben Berzerker. An introspective ballad that follows the dance Bad startreleased on May 17 and a second taste of a new album expected in stores next June.
“Basically, it had to be the opposite (Bad start was to appear after I know it’s late) and then I wanted something that moves. So now that Bad start came out, I want to get out my dark side!”, confides to us, smiling, Marie-Flore. The song I know it’s late “speaks of headwinds”, comments the artist. “I am very restless, I have contradictory emotions and I thought it was a pretty image to describe it. And it speaks of a somewhat fatalistic vision that I have of my relationship to happiness, which for me does not never lasts very long.”
A melancholic title succeeding a dancing song, here is all the ambivalence that the French singer puts down on paper in her new disc, the aptly named I don’t know if it’s okayto be published in June, three years after Robbery.
We dance there on the question of the relationship to age on 20 yearswe have tears in our eyes It would favour mewe get up, fierce, with If everto be ironic about CDT (All assholes editor’s note.). As the queen of text songs and punchlines, Marie-Flore reinvents herself to offer a more pop record than the previous one.
I don’t know if it’s okay it’s twelve unreleased songs to heal the disappointed love portrayed in Robberyhis last album released in 2019. This new project “is different in terms of inspirations, I tried to open the prism a little more. At the same time, I talk a lot more about myself, about my true self, about my vision of things, of relationships, but I also tackle themes that before would not have inspired me: my relationship as I age, my relationship to the world, what I can leave as a legacy…”, explains the ‘artist.
This disc, Marie-Flore created it in the middle of a pandemic, after realizing that she could not defend Robbery on stage due to the closure of the concert halls. “It took me a year after the start of the Covid to realize that my old record would not come back, I had the hope that the theaters would reopen (…). Suddenly, I started to put myself in a dynamic of creation, to tell me that it was necessary to move on”, explains the singer. A question then arises: “How was I going to tell myself this time?”
To answer it, Marie-Flore withdrew with “the teams of Robbery“, in “a house in the south, twice two weeks.” “I had never worked like that! And in the end, it was great“, she underlines.
As for his inspirations for I don’t know if it’s okay, Marie-Flore explains that she was also immersed in “personal experiences.” And to develop: “I am someone who works like that, it’s both autobiographical and autofictional. There is a large part of fantasies, things that I would like to happen to me. It’s linked to my feelings, to the observation of people and their relationships with each other, or to my relationships to me and with myself.”
I don’t know if it’s okay, it’s an album against the injection of happiness, the false pretenses often imposed in society. With incisive texts, sometimes melancholy, sometimes ironic, Marie-Flore cultivates her duality, with a pen “more focused on irony, the look I have on things. This record is more calm, less forceful”, underlines the singer, who concludes: “in fact, the main line that has moved (between the two albums) is me. I imagine that it infuses into the songs.”
Author, composer and performer, Marie-Flore was born at the end of the 1980s. Her first name, she owes it to the song of the American Joan Baez. “My parents were big fans and she has a song called Marie-Flore, which is about a little girl who lived in Arles in the south, whom she had met when she came to a concert in the south. C It’s a super beautiful song and they named me Marie-Flore in homage to this title”, explains the singer.
Moreover, the two Marie-Flore ended up meeting. Where ? “At a Joan Baez concert”. Buckle closed. As a teenager, the future singer entered the conservatory, where she remained for eight years. “It was not very easy, it was not a teaching in which I felt hatched. However, it served me a lot, to develop my ear. I stayed there for eight years and I gave up “, remembers Marie-Flore, who, once the conservatory behind her, starts to play the guitar, alone, “precisely refusing to have teachers.”
During her first year of college, she wrote a song and posted it on the MySpace platform. Spotted by a manager, she completes five other titles to present them to him. “That’s how it all started and how I told my parents that I was stopping my studies to start,” recalls Marie-Flore, who will sing first in English, then in French, following the advice of a relative: “I wrote a first song in French for the joke and I liked it. I surprised myself to love it and to find the same pleasure as I had in writing in English. was a new playground. Writing in French, you see that it resonates differently and then I had covered what I wanted to say in English.
So Marie-Flore sings in English and finds herself opening for a world famous rocker: Pete Doherty. “He’s great, you have to follow him, but he’s a very sensitive, very intelligent, gentle and above all talented person. I was impressed to see his charisma on stage. I was quite admiring to see how on a solo tour, he stirred the crowds just with a guitar and his voice. There are very few people who manage to do it, I find, “recalls the Frenchwoman.
The stage, Marie-Flore will find it on the occasion of the release of her new album, I don’t know if it’s okay. After the Printemps de Bourges, it is on view at the Botanical Nights in Brussels, at the Francofolies de la Rochelle, but also in concert at La Cigale, in Paris, on September 21, 2022.