also, i recently found out that the vinyl copies of “les ondes silencieuses” are now sold out, BUT i do have a few copies left at home and these are available, directly from me, for the price of 12 euros + postage – i can sign your copy if you wish, and you can also have iker spozio (the illustrator who made the artwork) sign it too

simply contact me through the contact page for more details

a small update: i forgot to mention that this vinyl is quite special-looking, so here is a picture to try and do it justice

as always, thanks for reading :-)))

cécile

all the info is here

I’m very much a “list person”,  but writing this particular list did seem slightly more insane than previously, because I listened to so much music these past few years, and given the sheer quantity of great music that’s out there, it’s just easy to forget about certain records, so I tried to make sure I included everything, and relistened to many of those records, which is why it took me forever to get the list together :-) !

It is definitely the best thing about making those lists though: I look at them, see the name of a record I may have not listened to in two or three years, and on it goes in the cd or vinyl player…

I hope the list will lead you to some nice discoveries too, and next time I won’t let 4 years elapse before making another one !

Cette semaine j’ai eu le plaisir de m’entretenir longuement avec Richard Robert, qui a longtemps travaillé aux Inrockuptibles (où parurent deux articles sur ma musique signés de sa main) et qui a créé une revue musicale en ligne, l’Oreille absolue, dont le propos est de « redonner la parole aux musiciens » : on y trouve donc  de nombreux entretiens, tous très approfondis, avec des musiciens de tous horizons, et le site forme au final une impressionnante « base de données » d’entretiens, un must pour les amoureux de la musique, à mon avis…  Dans cet entretien-fleuve je reviens sur mon expérience de ces quelques dernières années,  c’est mon premier entretien depuis bien longtemps et je suis ravie qu’il ait eu lieu hors du terrain de la « promotion » d’un nouveau disque, et qu’il soit sur des choses plus permanentes et essentielles…

l’article est ici

Of course, I knew that the only master on board was myself and that if I thought this was too much, I should just slow down, or even stop – which I eventually did, but it took me time: it’s not easy to say no to great offers, so you often just keep doing things because it seems a shame to turn them down. In a way, I guess the self-managed musician is very much like the small entrepreneur or craftsman, who puts in crazy hours not necessarily out of financial necessity or solely out of passion, but because that’s the very dynamic generated by being independent : if you’re successful at what you do, the demand gets stronger and stronger, and while a small entrepreneur can hire more people to help him, there is no substitute for me actually being on a stage – even if I get a roadie or some other person to help me, at the end of the day I either do the gig or I don’t, there is no real middle way.

I guess that ultimately, it’s a question of personality: I’m a lover of so many things in life that I’ve *always* found it hard to do just the one thing. Of course this is what grown-up life is mostly about, sacrificing some aspects of your life so that you can accomplish yourself in just one domain, but I just can’t reconcile myself to that. And as far as I’m concerned, having a serene domestic life is actually much more conducive to creating than having to follow some insane schedule which in the end has nothing to do with creation.

In the process I had to let go of a certain narcissism which is fed by touring and releasing records: you get used to seeing your name, reading about yourself, getting tons of emails and offers… I knew that by refusing all concert offers and by not releasing any record, this attention would fade out, and it was something I both feared and looked forward to. It has indeed happened, which is only natural, and was exactly what I needed in order to regain time – life’s real luxury and one without which creating is absolutely impossible.

NOT MAKING MUSIC

At first I had no desire to make music whatsoever, or even listen to it. Previously I’d always been driven by clear ideas for each album, and with “Les ondes silencieuses” I had reached the end of a cycle:  I had made my dream of a modern album with baroque instruments come true. What next? I found no obvious reply to that question.

I was actually familiar with the sort of crisis I was going through, as I’d gone through the exact same crisis when I was just a student playing in my tiny studio flat. After making music with a vengeance from the age of 15 to 20, I heard This Heat’s first album, and that stopped me right in my tracks… I won’t go into the details of this particular period, but it felt exactly the same: feeling bored with my instruments, bored with the records I could listen to… The only difference is that at the time I had almost no records to listen to and owned only two instruments (electric and acoustic guitars), and of course I wasn’t a professional musician! But after a 3 year gap, I did go back to making music, and that music became my first album… So I thought that hopefully, this time too, the same thing would happen and it was just a matter of being patient.

Of course I felt quite guilty about being a musician not wanting to play music or even listen to it. Then again, I also knew that feeling guilty wasn’t exactly going to help me get the desire and inspiration back, so I decided to embark on a creative pursuit which had tempted me for many years : learning ceramics (which in turn led to stone carving – see the ceramics and sculpture pages on this site if you want to know more) .

I was also able to enjoy all the simple and priceless pleasures that life can offer once you manage to free up more time:  spending lots of time in the kitchen (I’m a huge cooking fan – possibly as great a passion for me as music), reading books of all sorts, spending time outdoors, indoors in museums and at exhibitions… Last but not least, I left Paris and relocated to Spain next to the beautiful Atlantic, which brings me endless joy.

MAKING MUSIC AGAIN

And sure enough, after a while, the desire first to listen to music, then to make music gradually came back – to my immense relief, as I really felt a part of me had been missing.

Each new album seems a bigger challenge than the previous one, and this one’s no exception, especially after such a long gap. I’m still working on it and it’s been a bit of a roller-coaster, but then again making my albums has always felt that way, probably because what excites me (trying new things) is the very stuff that impedes a smooth working process (I have to try again and again, because I fail a lot before I succeed in anything)… The difference is that now, I know that getting the album ready for a certain date doesn’t matter in the long run, so I’m taking my time until I’m sure the music is ready…

Many thanks if you’ve read this far, this was a bit of a rant, but I really felt like sharing those feelings and events with you, before sharing something hopefully more important :-)

I don’t really know where to start as I feel there is so much to say. Ideally I would have liked to keep this short, and I could have, by merely saying that shortly after my last album I lost the desire to make music: I would have said the essential – or perhaps not. It takes some subtle evolution to turn somebody’s passion into something they actually don’t want (or feel unable) to do anymore, and I think the whole point of me writing this is to tell you about what went on for things to turn out that way (and may I hasten to add: and back again to me wanting and being able to make music again!). It’s happened to so many artists, and yet I feel it’s a subject that’s rarely talked about – possibly because it’s not a pleasant one, and even feels a little shameful?

IN THE BEGINNING…

But first I need to take you back a little bit to the beginning of my music-making as Colleen. When The Leaf Label released my first album, I was working full-time as an English teacher in a high school in the suburbs of Paris. Although I’d been making music since age 15 (I was 27 when the album was released), I would never have imagined I would one day release a record, let alone make music for a living. Yes, I’d had some vague dreams of being on stage (and I did play live a little bit with my first band in high school), but until the advent of computer-recorded music, I guess it really did look like you had to have some sort of career plan to even have a record out. Words fail to describe the happiness and excitement I felt when I learnt that I was going to have an album out, and be able to travel, play my music, and meet people…

As the first album took off, I went part-time, and shortly after the release of my second album, in 2006, I took the plunge and asked for a sabbatical, which I was granted at the last minute, just in time to dedicate myself to my last album, “Les ondes silencieuses”.

For me, the sabbatical was a test: would I still enjoy being a musician if it became my “job”?  I had previously thought that having a day job catering for my financial needs was a perfect way of being completely independent from an artistic point of view, but it had started to make no sense at all, and the frustration of not being able to accept great gig offers had just become too strong.

To this day I still don’t know how I managed to deal with everything when I was still working part-time as a teacher: on top of making my records and playing live, I dealt with organizing my touring schedule and with almost all of the administrative side of things, since I’ve chosen to have no manager or agent. It was exhausting, but I was passionate and knew that my music was understood and appreciated – the greatest energy-giver of all.

And yes, during that sabbatical I did feel that music was something I could dedicate myself to full-time, and that it would be criminal not to do so: you never know for how long you’re going to be inspired, nor how long there is going to be an interest in what you do. So I asked for a renewal of the sabbatical (I was  theoretically entitled to a total of 6 years), but it was refused , so I resigned from my teaching job, thereby losing the civil servant status attached to it and the possibility of re-entering the job later on. I still think this was one of the best decisions of my life, and yet, at that very moment, the not-so-exciting side aspects of being a “professional” musician coincided with my feeling of having reached the end of a creative cycle with my last album.

HIGHS AND LOWS

Without going into extremely boring details, let’s say that France has lots of red tape in general, and that for a musician who works mostly abroad this is even worse. With hindsight, and once everything is solved, it’s easy to underestimate the amount of stress generated by this type of problems, as well as the sheer amount of hours wasted on trying to solve them… But on a more or less subconscious level, I think I came to associate those problems with being a musician.

Many other things that a musician has to deal with have nothing to do with music, and I found out that the more successful you are, even at a relatively small level, the more these tend to pile up. Replying to emails became a huge issue, for instance.

I also started to feel very divided about playing live. On the one hand, some of my best experiences in life have been linked to playing live: the strong emotions that come with sharing music with an appreciative audience (and I’ve been so very lucky in that respect), meeting wonderfully welcoming people, getting to travel to beautiful places I’d never have had an opportunity to see otherwise …

On the other hand, travelling by myself, with my huge viola da gamba on my back and my 25-kilo suitcase full of gear, began to feel more and more often like an insane enterprise. I often thought “What ??? For one hour on stage, I have to spend 48 hours or more doing almost nothing but sitting in some kind of transport, sitting in a venue, soundchecking, packing again, not sleeping enough, and doing more sitting on more transport?”

This may read like I’m whining a lot, and sure enough there are many worse fates than being a touring musician, and I consider myself lucky to ever have had that amount of interest in my music and my live playing, but if you’ve ever accompanied a musician on tour or even on the one gig, you’ll know what I’m talking about. It is more of an accumulation thing in the end: if you do 30 gigs in a year and you think that the best way of doing it for your health and for your enthusiasm on stage is to spread them out throughout the year (which was my “tactics”), then you easily end up spending 80 or 90 days away from home, with perhaps 50 plane trips…  The first couple of years it felt awesome due to the novelty, but afterwards being away from home so much meant an endless race to catch up with the admin and email stuff that had accumulated during my absence, and once all that is dealt with you’re still supposed to be creating more music (and I’m not even mentioning the other “activities” that make up the rest of a normal person’s life).

There was also the added stress of playing partly on borrowed instruments (unfortunately you never know what kind of instrument you’re going to end up with, and at what moment – sometimes the instrument arrives at the last minute).

Lastly, I’d always had to create new pieces for my live shows, since I was never able to reproduce my albums live, apart from a couple of tracks. Not being able to play my albums never disturbed me as such (I’m still not convinced that the “aim” of a concert is to play songs as they are on a record, or songs that are on records at all), but after completing my last album, when inspiration started to fail me in general, I also began to feel “stuck” with what I could play live.

Finally one morning in Italy, while on a small tour, in front of the ticket machine at a train station where I was supposed to type the name of the town I was departing from, I found myself completely unable to remember where I was… It was one of those moments when suddenly you realize that something has to change.