After a four-year break to avoid too many concerts, the Jain singer returns with The Fool, an album named after a tarot card: “the fool, the one who goes on an adventure, advances despite everything”. The Frenchwoman had pulled the handbrake in the summer of 2019, canceling the end of her tour scheduled for 2020, including a Bercy in Paris (Accor Arena). A saving reflex in a career that has become a whirlwind. That is more than 300 concerts in fifteen countries – including Coachella, a Californian blockbuster festival -, 1.2 million albums sold worldwide for Zanaka (2015) and Souldier (2018), a Grammy nomination for the sound clip Makeba pipe. Not to mention her performance at the opening of the Women’s World Cup in France.
“I stopped at the right time. If I continued, I was going to be too tired. I canceled Bercy but it would have been canceled anyway with the health crisis, so my conscience was appeased”, she smiles, during a meeting with AFP in Paris. Obviously, we talk to him about Stromae, who has just canceled part of his tour, after a previous burn-out he talked about in his last album Multitude.
“You have to take care of yourself, mentally, that’s the priority, because there’s a lot of pressure. We carry a show on our shoulders, ”comments the author-composer-performer. The chosen break and the imposed confinement allowed Jain to dive back into listening to “big classics, like Kate Bush, David Bowie, Pink Floyd”. Which colored The Fool, which comes out on Friday. “It marked me, especially the richness of the arrangements, the psychedelic lyrics. It took me where I had never been.”
The artist’s third album – designed like the previous ones with Yodelice in production – is much more pop and less synthetic than his previous hits Come or Alright. The writing came back over stays in a cabin facing the sea near Marseille. “It was like in my 16-year-old bedroom, with a sea view. It was cool to start all over again, she begins. Where I grew up, Pointe-Noire (Congo), Abu Dhabi, Dubai (United Arab Emirates), there was always the sea. I always had this attraction, I was surfing as a teenager”. Born in Toulouse, the 30-year-old lived a childhood according to
Vision of a starry sky from the shed and fantasized cosmos in Pink Floyd (The dark side of the moon) or David Bowie (Space oddity) tinted Jain’s English texts. The figure of the moon returns in The Fool and Night heights, a satellite flies over Take a chance and the title Cosmic love speaks for itself.
“It’s about metaphors. When I sing that someone is dancing on the moon, it is someone who is looking for himself in the universe, discovering himself, taking risks”. The symbolism of the fool’s card in the tarot, practiced in his family, resonates here. The topics covered are more intimate than before. “In my two other albums, I spoke of universal love, anti-racism, peace. There, it’s much more personal, it’s just love that takes up almost half of the songs.
And to split the armor, nothing like dropping the uniform – this famous combination, available in eleven models – worn by Jain. “There will be several stage outfits, it will be another proposal, not necessarily inspired by the 1970s, but inspired, galactic, cosmic” she leaves in suspense. Jain’s new rocket will be in orbit in France at summer festivals like Solidays, Beauregard and Les Vieilles Charrues, before a Zenith-type venue tour this fall.
