EMILIE SIMON’s plush, artful soundscapes which have yielded her significant praise and awards in her French homeland and acclaim across the rest of Europe and Japan are set to delight and inspire U.S. music devotees with the arrival of her breathtaking album THE FLOWER BOOK (Milan). Consisting of material collected from her 2003 self-titled debut, 2006’s Végétal (which reaped a four-star review in Mojo) and SIMON’s critically acclaimed motion picture soundtrack for the original worldwide (except for the U.S. and U.K.) release of La Marche De L’Empereur (The March of The Penguins), the 15-track disc highlights EMILIE’s uniquely sensual work.
Despite garnering best album honors in the electronic category at France’s “Victoires De La Musique” Awards for her debut, and being touted as one of the most promising female artists, the Montpellier-bred chanteuse is quick to champion her independence as an artist over such acclaim. “[Awards] are nice, but it’s like a cherry on top, really,” the 28-year-old singer/songwriter insists. “It’s great when you have the feeling you are doing something important or that you’re understood. But it doesn’t alter the way I work in any way. I’m always thinking back on what I have done, because I don’t want to be redundant. I want to make music without rules, without anybody telling me what I have to do.”
Originality thrives on The Flower Book, as exhibited by the La Marche-excerpted opener “Song of the Storm.” Literally ice-tinged, SIMON rubbed pieces of ice together to produce beats and sounds to blend with her electronic machinery and the song is bolstered by inviting lyrics (“Can’t you hear my storm coming/Stones falling on to you/Can’t you feel the earth shaking/Big dark clouds forming now”). EMILIE says her invitation to work on the project caught her by surprise.
“The producers of the film’s original version took a big risk, actually, because they wanted me to do the music but I wasn’t really established.” SIMON admits. “They knew my first album and they thought my music was so different from the common kind of documentary music. They wanted to do something different and artful and unique. They knew that I was interested in the texture of music, and that although I like electronic music, I’m interested in arrangements and melodies. I was interested in making music in keeping with the elements – water and ice or wood and flowers. I had just finished a song called ‘The Ice Girl’ about coldness and ice. The film was sent to me and when they contacted me I said, ‘that’s really funny, I’ve just finished this song. So my involvement just grew from there.’”
Despite the frustration of having her songs shut out of the American release of the film, the sparkling material that shapes The Flower Book firmly defies that Hollywood blunder. “The explanation I was given was that my music was not adaptable to American audiences,” EMILIE chuckles, sounding hell bent on proving them wrong. “It’s really strange to hear something like this when Japanese people, Chinese people and Eastern European people have all adapted to it. It’s hard because for any musician, your music is like your baby. But now I’m happy because everything is not solely about the movie. This album is a reflection of what I have done.”
For the Végétal-culled material like “Dame De Lotus,” “Rose Hybride du The” and “Fleur De Saison,” EMILIE focused in on names of flowers (garden or wild), carnivorous plants, climbing plants, floating blooms and ghost-like trees to inform her art. “The poetic link on Végétal was plants and vegetation. They remind us of our own origins. I was inspired by parallels like how the sap of a tree is to us and our blood for example. Also, the sonic link was the use of materials like water, wind, fire, wood and stones that I recorded by myself in natural surroundings and then I’d go in a studio with a percussionist coming from the contemporary music. Those sounds are the basis of all my programming. Creating Végétal was a great experience for me."
As for the language choice in her songs, SIMON refuses to over-think it. “I don’t make a big separation between music and lyrics. It’s all part of the same thing,” she says. “I think it’s the song that chooses the language. If I’m on my piano or I’m writing and the melody comes in my head, the words might come in English or French. It doesn’t really matter to me because it’s all part of the same creative process.”
The daughter of a sound engineer, SIMON works in her home studio that allows for spontaneity and the quick germination of ideas. Although she had access to her father’s studio at a young age, she says she didn’t start recording herself until she was 16. “Still, the nice thing for me was that I was not scared of the machines or the cables and plugging things in when I started,” EMILIE says. “It’s a completely comfortable environment for me.”
In her early twenties, EMILIE recorded demos after moving to Paris from the South of France that wound up landing her a deal with Universal France. “I had a friend who worked at a label and she felt it was time to play my songs for people. So she basically took the responsibility and they sparked an interest.”
Songs from that era like “Desert” and the brilliantly conceived “Flowers” earned her a loyal fan base at home with her 2003 debut. A subsequent video for the latter, replete with Tim Burton-inspired animation, is a captivating example of SIMON’s complete involvement in her work. “It was my idea,” she says of the clip. “I was looking for a way to introduce the song. You can take it literally but if you look a little deeper there’s a lot more there.”
“If you were to put me in a video smiling in the middle of flowers, it would be the complete opposite of my idea for the song,” SIMON continues. "I had to find a way to communicate the second degree and thought it would be fun to distort this happy little song. I had this idea of a little girl in a cemetery who is coming with dead flowers to a grave. In the video, everything takes place by night in Montmartre where I was living at the moment. I worked with a Parisian team called NoBrain who are big fans of Burton’s work like me, so this was my cute little homage.”
A tribute of a different sort is EMILIE’s sensual rendering of The Stooges’ classic “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” recorded upon her arrival in Paris, where she actually worked in a squat for more than a year. SIMON says she discovered the song as a teenager. “Every time I was at a basement party, it seemed like everybody was into that song. So it was a great memory for me,” she reveals. “One night, with, like, pigeons coming in through the windows, I was all alone working on my first album and I thought of the song. I was just having fun, and it was spontaneous, but the recording ended up feeling very personal.”
As for her own compositions, which account for the rest of the disc, EMILIE says, “It’s important to know when a song is done, because if you work on something too long, you can kill it. And I don’t want to kill something that’s precious. Some songs I’ll work on for a year, a little bit at a time. I might go off and write a full song and then come back to it. It’s a little bit like painting. Some things come quick and it’s very clear that it has to be a certain way and others will require you to go back every day and add a little bit of color here or there.”
Although The Flower Book seems destined to put her stateside career in bloom, EMILIE SIMON is already a huge success in her own mind. “To me, it’s being given the opportunity to have my music heard around the world,” she concludes. “You can’t control if people like it or not. My success is in having the possibility to come and express myself and reach people who believe in my songs.”
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