It’s an album that offers an escape to our lives under curfew, far, far from the song’s tendency to withdraw into autofiction. Discreet author but on the lookout like the night owl that adorns the cover, Arman Méliès has transcended himself with Laurel Canyon, one of the most successful attempts in France to appropriate the American folk and rock heritage. A record that we will write in the lineage ofDare Josephine (1991), Alain Bashung, and Mustang (1999), by Jean-Louis Murat, who in their time managed to go beyond the applied homage, if not complexed, to impose a personal vision of these large spaces haunted by intimidating tutelary figures.
Bashung had made the pilgrimage to Memphis (Tennessee) and Murat had dragged his boots in the dust of Arizona. When Méliès’ journey is as magical as that to the Moon, made in 1902 by the pioneer of cinema from which Jean-Louis Fiévé borrowed the surname, associated with the sculptor Arman for his artist name.
The Parisian musician has never set foot in Laurel Canyon, this verdant district of Los Angeles where he implanted imaginary redwoods, a lost paradise associated between the mid-1960s and that of the 1970s with a very creative community. musical – including an excellent documentary, recently broadcast on Arte, recalled the story. On the other hand, Arman Méliès knows San Francisco and has authorized himself, without concern for distances, to invoke the spirit of the native Jack London in the same way as that of Jim Morrison. Few names (with that of the New England poet Emily Dickinson) to appear in this storytelling which did not yield to the ease of name dropping.
“The idea was not to make a Californian folk album like the Americans still know very well how to do today with someone like Jonathan Wilson, but to be inspired by this place and the breath of this scene, and to translate it my way: current songs by a Frenchman, through the prism of a fantasy that allows reality to be twisted ”, explains Arman Méliès, who has not been idle lately, since Laurel Canyon ends in style an American trilogy completed in just nine months, after two essentially instrumental records, Roden Crater and Basquiat’s Black Kingdom.
The set was designed ” in the countryside “, near Etampes (Essonne), between Paris and Orléans. With the confinements, the musician forced himself in his studio to “Work every day so as not to go completely crazy” : “Like I’m going to the office. ” About ten new songs have already emerged for a future album.
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