JEANNE CHERHAL


The limit as a beginning




En toute amitié tu as relativement envie d’être mon amant pour ce soir... Jeanne Cherhal returns with her third studio album, Charade (Barclay, 2010), offering us eleven songs with a common thread: a charade into four parts . It’s a very personal work in which Jeanne reveals her passionate and rational thoughts always in a continuous struggle. From that struggle is born a sound in which she plays all the instruments. She sings Mon corps est une cage as a passionate stimulus. So, she decided to isolate herself for a year in the studio in order to create and record. The limits are a starting point, never and ending one.

Isolation may lead her to magnify her impulses but the feeling is that it is a consequence of them. The need to assimilate what she has lived to the full and to return to the desire’s ring in order to fight with renovated forces against the absurd walls. Je t'appelles dans la nuit, même au-delà de minuit tu réponds, je te dis "je suis perdue" et tu me guides par les rues et les ponts. Jeanne satirizes the contradictions between desire and engagement. En toute amitié starts howling with a firm rhythm, the excitement in the middle of the night turns on a vigorous piano which is followed by the other instruments. Everything goes in crescendo through sighs and gels car amitié comme ça car c'est sacré.

Plus rien me fera mal
sounds more like a wish than a reality. Jeanne sings fragile to the wounds suffered. The piano sounds fearful while she longs for sous le ciel trop doux plus rien me fera mal. But she knows very well that never will because life is a losing hand. Mon corp est une cage brings us the origin of suffering. She falls in a lack of communication because the misunderstood boundaries. Also, the lack of curiosity and enthusiasm for the game lead us to reject what doesn’t respond in the way we want to. Passion is a skill that few people have and few people can recognize. The forms are a beginning to create new questions over the other and not a place to hide us. To love someone is to want to discover him being also open to be discovered. Mon corp est une cage qui m’empêche de danser avec l’homme que j’aime et moi seule ai la cléf. And the limit determines us to the silence.




Reviens-moi, marche dans mes pas sung in a tremendously evocative tune. The notes flow like the waves of a whimsical and almost inconsistent sea. She abandons herself to her one desire and claims the possible origin of her isolation to return. And we all stay facing the sea with arms folded without being aware that every second counts.



Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photos by Tania et Vincent