Already fifteen years that Cléa Vincent has been stepping on stage with that childlike fervor, that passion for pop and its elasticity, from her early days in Parisian bars to last year’s show at the Bataclan for the release of her third album Advitam Æternamour. You could say she needs no introduction, her name being inseparable from some of the most exciting work to emerge in contemporary French independent music. From the very beginning, she asserted her taste for spontaneous, candid, sunlit music, turning her songs not only into spaces of introspection but also into small capsules for dialogue. She collaborates constantly, with Kim Giani, Jeanne Balibar, Alison Wheeler, Jacques, NUSKY & VAATI, João Selva, Les Clopes…driven by a desire for sharing, for visions that meet and collide across genres. Alongside her work as a composer, she dedicates herself to giving a voice to the artists around her, notably through her show Sooo Pop, broadcast on YouTube in 2018 and 2019, where she welcomed guests as varied as Christophe, Moodoïd, Mathilde Fernandez, Katerine, and The Pirouettes. Like others of her generation, she claims the influence of francophone pop from the 1980s, but rather than being a successor to Jacno, Cléa draws from everything that shapes her era, fully plugged into the present, its faces, its energies, its collisions. She travels too, a way of reshuffling the cards of her inspiration, and her discovery of South America, of bossa nova and samba during her tour dates, became the catalyst for her series of EPs Tropi-Cléa. If there is one thing Cléa Vincent has consistently championed throughout her career, it is absolute freedom, whether through her choice of playing in unexpected venues or in her own artistic turns, often running counter to what one might expect of her. She follows her curiosity wherever it leads, even if it means abandoning commercial logic to remain completely true to her instinct. Each new album marks a stage of her life, and Speakeasy inevitably offers a window into a kind of pause. “Advitam Æternamour left me almost speechless, and after that I wanted a very minimalist record, like a moment of respite, a quiet room.” Six piano pieces, with no lyrics, quite the paradox for a pop singer? Not really, for someone who began by studying piano at the Conservatory, first with classical repertoire, then with jazz improvisation. She has always known how to make her keyboard resonate, to let it speak its own intangible language, and that is the beauty of this new opus, where we rediscover delicate fragments of Cléa, her melancholy, her tone, without her voice ever truly intervening. A little weary of the limits of pop lyrics, she returns to the essential, to the instrument she had set aside during her tours, to her first traveling companion, with whom she still had stories to tell. She reunited with the piano, and together, in absolute intimacy, they learned to know each other again. The result is a collection of gorgeous soundscapes where you feel slightly airborne, floating just above the daily noise that surrounds us. Liquid and flowing, the melodies follow one another, accompanied only by discreet drum machine and bass. Composed and performed while a new life was growing inside her, the pieces carry within them the gentle tranquility of a heart awaiting the arrival of someone dear, a heart soothed, filled with constant wonder before a destiny that keeps surprising it. With Speakeasy, the musician catches her breath, offering a few moments of grace, an airy punctuation that will slip between the hits in her repertoire when the time comes to take the road again.
