The end of 2017 is marked by the great come-back musical by Charlotte Gainsbourg. After six years of absence, the 46-year-old actress and singer returns to center stage with the release of her fifth studio album entitled Rest (the first clips released feature her three children, Ben, 20, Alice, 15 and Joe, 6), in which she sings in English and French. Composed after the sudden death of his sister Kate Barry in 2013, this opus was recorded with the help of French electro musician SebastiAn in a studio in New York, where the Franco-British artist resides.
As we know, it was in the United States that Charlotte Gainsbourg had decided to settle after the painful loss of her elder sister. In Rest, the daughter of Jane Birkin and Serge Gainsbourg shamelessly evokes the death of her father but also that of her sister: she has also dedicated the song to him Kate (co-written with Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, member of the duo Daft Punk). “When I lost my sister (…) there was a kind of evidence: I couldn’t write about anything else. Everything revolved around her now. It crystallized writing, it made it possible“, she said recently for Vogue.
Interviewed by the Sunday newspaper in its edition of November 12, 2017, the companion of Yvan Attal thus reconsidered his decision to leave France to settle in Manhattan, revealing for the first time an anecdote about his sister. When she made the choice to move to New York to change her life, she was overtaken in spite of herself by the memory of Kate Barry. “When Kate died, I had too much trouble with Paris and the neighborhood where I lived, close to my father’s. It was going back to my childhood shared with Kate … I was sinking, it was too hard. We wanted a new, neutral place. Except that once [à New York], I realized this was the city where Kate was going on her own to see her father, John Barry. It wasn’t so neutral anymore. We don’t do anything at random …“, she confided.
Today, the memory is still anchored, even if less painful. By evoking Kate Barry on a daily basis with her relatives and now in her music, Charlotte Gainsbourg was able to exorcise her sorrows. “I tell everyone about it and not just through this album. I was sometimes afraid that SebastiAn would tell me ‘ok, you don’t want to talk about something else?’, But he was kind enough to accompany me“, she concluded.
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