Taking Back Paris

“I was living in New York for a few years,” Émilie Simon explains of the genesis of her new and sixth album, Mue; its title roughly translates to transformation from her native French, “and I came back to France for my [2011] album, Franky Knight, and two movie soundtracks. So I actually came back to Paris and spent more time there and started to be inspired by a different side of Paris that I didn’t really see before. It was more romantic and beautiful, and just maybe this cliché that people say very often about Paris, like romantic city and everything, but living there as a student I think I was not really seeing that. But to live somewhere else, come back, I started to be inspired by this beauty.”

Initially something of an electronic artist, Simon has always sought new ways to find inspiration for her compositions, which, since her self-titled 2004 debut have moved away from electronics towards real instrumentation. For her second album, she sought to utilise the sounds of ice cracking and footsteps in snow in order to create an aural sense of coldness. The result ended up being used as the soundtrack for documentary film, March Of The Penguins, although America thought it too avant-garde and replaced it with something more conventional. So for her non-soundtrack third album, 2006’s Végétal, Simon took her recording equipment out and captured the sounds of flowers, trees and grass, which she mixed in with more conventional rock and orchestral elements. By 2009, she was living in New York, again seeking new sounds and experiences, the inspiration for that year’s album, The Big Machine.

“New York of course is a very different energy,” Simon admits. “New York is more an extroverted and direct, upfront energy, and Paris is more shades, in between lines, something less direct and strong but more like large… and sad – very different. Paris J’ai Pris Perpète (Paris It Took Me A While) was the first song I wrote for this album, and actually, when I wrote this song, I knew it was going to be the core of something, and all the songs came from this starting point, and I knew that Paris was part of it at this point.”

It was important, too, for Simon to write and perform in French once more, after a couple of predominantly “English” albums.

“When I wrote The Big Machine, I wanted to completely ‘dig in’ to this wonderful new experience of living in New York, and so the English language made sense. I wanted to explore more, and I actually wrote a few songs with Graham Joyce, an English writer, who recently passed away. So it was really because I was interested in the English language, and working with a real novelist was very interesting for me.

“But it’s not my first language, so coming back to Paris was coming back to French, to something very poetic inspired by this city, so very personal too. Every album is a different adventure.”