The babbling that introduces the first seconds of Where the willows don’t weep, Adrien Gallo’s new solo album, are not those of baby rockers, but the twins of the twins of this young 32-year-old dad. After making the guitars roar with the BB Brunes (Blonde like me, Nico Teen Love), in the second half of the 2000s, as little Parisian brothers of the Strokes and the Libertines, before jumping to the rhythms of synthesizers, in the 2010s, with his group (Long Haul Puzzle) or during a first solo attempt (Gemini), the ex-cantor of youthful excitement cradles his new family life with a delicacy adorned with acoustic guitars, piano and string quintet. As if, after rock outbursts and pop dances, maturity brought him closer to the song.
Since its beginnings, the prestige of Anglo-Saxon references has rubbed shoulders with the French-speaking roots of Adrien Gallo. The first hymns of BB Brunes thus did not deny anything of the Telephone. In the same way that their synth-pop mutation owed as much to Etienne Daho as to Metronomy. If Adrien Gallo, for the first time, wanted to chisel arrangements of violins, harp, flute and vibraphone, he owes it in particular to his taste of baroque and folk pop of the 1960s and 1970s.
Live with a string quintet
The subdued chamber music of the title song or One loves the other and the other one another thus claims the influence of the intricate intimism of the former singer of the Zombies, the Englishman Colin Blunstone. “His first solo album, One year [1971], is a masterpiece, an ultimate benchmark of timeless beauty ”, insisted, at the end of July, the French. With his childhood friend the sound engineer Maxime Kosinetz, co-director of the disc, the singer with brown curls says he also fantasized about Nick Drake, Cat Stevens, Paul Simon, the too little-known Emitt Rhodes or the bucolic. Ram (1971) by Paul and Linda McCartney. But with Where the willows do not weep, he also wanted to dive back into a French repertoire, from the golden age of song of the 1950s and 1960s to the variety figures of the 1970s and 1980s.
By paying himself the luxury of singing live with a string quintet, in the very vintage Studios Saint-Germain belonging to Raphaël Hamburger (son of Michel Berger and France Gall), Adrien Gallo thus sought to find a little of the emotion productions from before the yé-yé. When, for example, Jacques Brel or Charles Aznavour recorded live, with an orchestra. “To play while adapting to the qualities and defects of the singer; singing while discovering what musicians produce for you brings more life to a song than by recording separately one and the other “, explains Adrien Gallo.
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