There’s no stopping her. Following the release of her début album La Symphonie des Éclairs in 2023, hundreds of gigs and two particular memorable performances at the Cannes Film Festival and the closing ceremony of the Paris Olympics, the young artist Zaho de Sagazan has not only taken the French music scene by storm, but is also making waves across the Atlantic and the English Channel, and even counts Iggy Pop among her fans. Just a mere few weeks after her first U.S shows, this ‘Little Storm’ is now about to embark on her first European tour which she will kick off on February 21st in The Academy (SOLD OUT bien sûr!).
I find the title “La Symphonie des Éclairs” (“The Symphony of Lightning”) to be a particularly powerful synesthesia. I was wondering what it represented for you?
It’s one of the most biographical songs on my album, where many of them aren’t about me and which I’ve written by observing others. This is really the song that explains my whole life and my discovery of music. I’m very sensitive and for a very long time I saw being sensitive as a flaw, in the sense that it always translated into crying a lot, shouting, anger and so on. I didn’t understand myself either because I didn’t understand these emotions I had inside me. I was about 15 when I discovered the piano, and I suddenly started crying on my piano. It was immediately a lot more interesting than crying on my pillow, and so it did me a lot of good. It meant I could finally leave my parents alone. I mean, I cried a lot less in other situations, and on top of that it made for pretty songs. So, from that moment on, I became obsessed with the idea of writing songs.
Little by little, the more songs I wrote, the more I understood myself. I had the time to think carefully about the words I was going to use. I was a little girl who cried quickly and had difficulty expressing myself, all of a sudden, I had the time. If I wanted to spend a year on a theme and find the right words, I could do it. Little by little I embraced those emotions. It was with time that I understood that what I thought was a great flaw was actually a great quality. All of a sudden, this sensitivity was making beautiful things, and so it was a big upheaval in my life. It’s a song about a Little Storm (she was nicknamed “Petite Tempête” when she was a kid) who’s going to understand the point of being one. I’ve always liked the idea of going places where the weather isn’t great and trying to understand how things work, and what goes on in all those storms.
At what point did you decide you were going to make music your career? Was there a particular moment that triggered your decision?
I don’t remember a moment in particular… But I do remember the first time I started playing the piano. Basically, I wanted to copy Tom Odell whom I was a big fan of, and I could see that he seemed to be as sensitive as I was, but he put that sensitivity in the right place, so I thought “Wait a minute, maybe I’ll try to do the same thing.” And I remember vividly that first time I was at the piano and thought to myself that I’d never be bored again. I quickly felt that I was touching on something that would absolutely change my whole life. At the time, I didn’t know whether I’d decide to make a career out of it, but I’d spend 10 hours a day at that piano, I’d never see time go by and I’d go back to it the next day, the next, and the next… I could see that this piano was going to become a companion.
I remember THAT click, but I don’t remember another one. I think I knew that it was soothing me incredibly, and so I found it hard to give up that idea. Slowly in high school I noticed that I wasn’t going to class anymore because I was spending all my time playing and rehearsing, so I eventually said to myself “well, now I think I’m going to have to face up to the fact that I love it too much and that it’s all I think about, so there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go for it.” But that trigger you’re talking about I guess happened the first time I took up the piano. It was a real discovery for me. Very intense.
Many of us can relate to this hypersensitivity you often talk about. Personally, I’d never heard an artist talk about it so openly that way. I’ve always been hearing for so long about the umbrella term of the “melancholy” of artists in France, but it’s just another way of not really talking about it. I wondered why it’s been so important for you to articulate it in your interviews and on stage?
I think it’s because when I was little, I wished someone had told me. I felt so misunderstood and I hated myself too. I was in a constant state of self-hatred, and I think that’s hard to understand, even for the people around us. As a parent, if you see your little girl crying all the time, you ask her what’s going on and she doesn’t know herself, it’s a bit dramatic, when in fact it’s not that dramatic. I understood it afterwards, but it can be really dramatic, both for yourself and for those around you. I suspected that there were too many people who weren’t yet aware that this hypersensitivity was a good thing. I was lucky enough to work mine out because I discovered music, but that’s not the case for everyone.
Some 60-year-olds still think they’re too weak, because we often associate these kinds of words with it, whereas I don’t think it’s a weakness at all. I thought it was a theme I could tackle because I knew it very well, and that’s what I’m looking for in my music anyway. It’s about giving messages that I think are important. I am delighted to say to all these Little Storms that I’m one of them and I’ve managed to make something pretty out of it, and I’m sure they can too, even if they don’t make art and that’s fine. It’s part of them and that makes them kind and compassionate. I’ve found an answer and I want to give it to all the people who still feel misunderstood.
Your songs are sonically very rich. They’re almost very cinematic in a way, and I’m thinking in particular of the track “Tristesse” in which there’s a sort of raw metallic atmosphere that is very striking. What role do aesthetics play in your song-writing process?
For the moment, because I don’t know if it will always be the case, we’ve always worked this way. I usually write the words and the vocals on the piano first, I do a quick demo on Logic and then I go see my two great friends, Alexis and Pierre with whom I did the whole album. Pierre is my right-hand man really, he’s everywhere, he’s even on tour with me. We go into the studio and we usually spend a lot more time arranging the song than I do writing it. For “Tristesse”, we spent four years working on it. I love the idea of writing a song and I love music too. We spent a very long time working on the principle of the sound. Once we found it, it became a little bit easier. I’m accompanied by two other sound enthusiasts; we’re all big music lovers and we spend a lot of time sending each other music and listening to it. I could record simple vocals and piano types of songs, but I think I’d be bored out of my brain pretty quickly. I need to dance. I like rough, un-produced sounds but I also love electronic music, I like scrap metal and clanking noise. I like too many things at the same time, whether it’s orchestras or other things, and that’s what we tried to do, to mix a bit of everything we liked.
That’s why you can either find a very 60s feel in “Je Rêve” or a very 80s atmosphere in “Ô travers” and so on. I really didn’t want to just do pop songs. I really wanted to do chanson mixed with electronic music. It’s something you feel a lot more when you come to our gigs actually. We spend a lot of time dressing up these songs, which are basically very naked, originally with piano and vocals alone, and I love this part of the work. Depending on how you dress up the song, it doesn’t say the same thing at all. What I find fascinating is that at every stage, you’re questioning the story behind the song, and what it’s trying to say. If you whisper over a piano melody or if you shout over electronic music, the lyrics may be the same, but they won’t mean the same thing at all, so it’s an exciting process.
We feel it very much when we listen to your songs. Each track seems to have its own world.
That’s kind of the idea, yes.
A lot of incredible things have happened to you in just two or three years, so I was wondering… What do you dream of today?
I dream of lots of things. I spend my time dreaming. I dream that it will last a long time. I have to admit, I’m at a point in my life where things are going really well, because I’m getting better and better, and I see my team doing well, and I see that we’re doing great things every night. The gigs are going really well, and at the same time, there are 40 of us in the team and we love each other. We’re having a fantastic time and I’m really proud of us and what we’re doing, so I hope it will last. I dream of love. I dream of… Actually, I don’t dream of the same things as I used to. Before, I tended to dream very big in the sense of achieving things a bit bigger than myself, but now I know that that’s not really what happiness is about, and that it might lie elsewhere. I love people too much, so I still hope to get to meet more wonderful people in my lifetime, while getting to know even more all the fantastic people I’ve already met. And also, to make beautiful songs. I hope that I’ll manage to make a beautiful second album, that I’ll surprise myself, and that it’ll make people who listen to it feel good. Above all, I hope that all of this will continue.
Zaho De Sagazan plays The Academy, Dublin on February 21st.
Words: Julie Bienvenu
Photos: Zoë Joubert
