New album “Phoenix” – Phoenix in the breach

Charlotte Cardin’s lyrics are awesome. Still, their pop works on the radio too.

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It’s a well-known story: struggling with fame, with the public image, with yourself. The 26-year-old singer / songwriter Charlotte Cardin from Quebec has been a model since she was 15 and was the face for the well-known fashion house Chanel, for which she still works as a brand ambassador. The fact that Cardin has decided to share what she is deeply about with the world seems at first quite conclusive.

Charlotte Cardin: Don’t be afraid of vulnerability

Models and actors who sing are, after all, nothing new. Even her unerring, radio-compatible mixture of folk, R’n’B and electronics does not suggest that an artist is balancing on a knife’s edge between vulnerability and star status. Instead, one could almost think that for Cardin music is a safe shelter, the counterbalance to modeling.

But this impression is deceptive: if you listen more closely, you will notice that Cardin is not hiding her actual feelings behind love and separation stories that have been heard a thousand times. She has spent the past few years tearing down the last protective walls that were left after her debut EPs “Big Boy” (2016) and “Main Girl” (2017), which were streamed millions of times.

“This album took two years because at the beginning of the writing process I was trying to gain control over what I wanted to show,” says Cardin of her first album “Phoenix”, which she started working on in 2019. “In the end, however, it became obvious that I had to allow the true impulses more strongly in order for my music – and my life – to make any sense.”

“Phoenix” exhibits contradictions and ambivalence

What fruits it bears when Cardin not only allows vulnerability and contradictions, but exhibits them, is shown by two songs between which Cardin spans the whole ambivalence of a separation. “Hallelujah Baby, we’re no longer together”, she sings in “Passive aggressive” and then in “Meaningless”: “I can arrange meeting a stranger, forget you a day / but I can’t imagine what even happens beyond the pain. “” Meaningless “is also the song in which Cardin surrenders to the insecurity after the separation – and in it discovers freedom:” See the sun leading us / to the land of the lost and the reasonless / hear the drum beating us / I forever surrender, the rest is meaningless. “No shelter.

8. April 2021 // Jonah Lara

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