Carla Bruni's New Album of Covers, "French Touch"
Carla Bruni makes the standard multi-hyphenate model look like a underachiever. Italian born - but French bred - the now 50-year-old model was one of the original supers who strutted down Gianni Versace’s runways to George Michael’s Freedom 90. In 1997, she stepped back to pursue songwriting and eventually released her own album, "Quelqu’un M’a Dit," in 2002. Five more albums followed, including last year’s "French Touch," a record of covers that she sings in English.
Listen Here "French Touch" by Carla Bruni
Bruni is also, of course, the former First Lady of France. She married Nicolas Sarkozy in November 2007, six months after he took office. They married three months later, and have a daughter, Giulia, age 6. (Bruni also has a son, Aurélien, 17.) They live in Paris now, where Bruni is a mother by day and singer and performer by night. She refers to Sarkozy rather endearingly as "my man" - as in "my man and I watch that on TV!"
While Bruni continued to write and record music during her husband’s tenure as the French head of state, it was a challenge to perform live. She is now making up for lost time, and is in the middle of a tour that will take her through North America and Latin America. (Learn more about the dates here.)
On her album (and her set list) is the Tammy Wynette classic "Stand by Your Man." And Bruni always has done just that - but never at the expense of her own career and visibility. I asked her about overcoming stage fright, her favorite language to sing in, and what it was really like working with Gianni Versace.
Do you enjoy performing live?
I like it very much now. You know when I started writing my songs, I thought I would actually give them to other people to sing them. I would only be a songwriter. Then I became a singer. I was very, very shy even though I was already 34 years old. I’m not that kind of person that would run on stage - I felt always very scared. I thought I was going to die every time I went up on stage. But little by little I learned and how to stop my fear. You actually don’t die. You think you’re going to die but you’re not. Finally now, not only do I like it, but I adore it. I’m not so crazy about touring life, which is away from home, but being on stage and going from city to city is just wonderful.
Do you have a trick for dealing with stage fright?
I try to get into the music because it brings you somewhere else. Music is more than words, it says more than what one writes. There’s something about the music that carries you away. I try to get into the music and concentrate on it and try to give my emotion to the audience, and to feel my emotions but not too much.
Did modeling help you feel more comfortable in public - as First Lady or as a performer?
The modeling helped me very much when I was first lady because it helped me to cope with the pictures, to cope with being so public and having such a public life. But it doesn’t really help me to go on stage and neither did that time having a public when my husband was President of France, because when you go on stage, it’s all about your voice and your lyrics and your style and it’s very different from modeling: it’s much more emotional and personal than modeling and the political world.
This album is all covers and it’s also the first album you sing in English. What was that like?
Yes, they’re covers but I feel like I wrote them somehow. I tried to sing them as if they were my own songs. And english is the language for pop music, it’s very different from French. French is a very literary language and it’s fantastic to write because it has a very strong literary power. You have many ways of saying the same thing so it’s a very rich language for poetry, for literature. But it doesn’t really sing right. it doesn’t really bear simplicity. It has to be sort of sophisticated or it sounds stupid. English isn’t really like that. No matter how simple the song, the lyrics, it just sounds fantastic in English. You can keep something naive and simple about it and it just sounds grand. It has a lot of rhythm and a lot of strength. Italian is also fantastic for singing because it’s very vocal. Even reading the menu sounds like a song. It’s only food but it sounds nice.
Who are your biggest musical influences?
Well my favorite, as writers, would be Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, and also country music people. I love Dolly Parton. I like simple writing and I also like blues. I like Bessie Smith. I also love older soul ladies like Billie Holiday. Of course I’ve been listening to these people over and over, but as a songwriter if I had to choose I would choose Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen because they make songs that I just can’t forget. Leonard Cohen: he wrote songs like they were prayers.
Why did you choose these songs to cover?
I know these are famous songs that sort of belong to everybody and everybody has memories about them but what we tried to do was to make them as if they were my songs and we’d be sitting by a fireplace in the winter and just sing them in the most simple way. Also we tried to change most of the songs. Not Moon River and not the Tammy Wynette song Stand By Your Man - those are very hard to change. But all the other songs, we tried to adapt them. How do you take a jacket and try to make it suit you? As if it was trying to get into some outfit that is not exactly yours but that you have to try to make it look good.
You walked the Versace runway this summer as part of an iconic group of supermodels. What was that like?
We were surprised it went everywhere. We were surprised by the reaction of the people at the show. It was quite emotional. We were behind the curtain the whole time so we heard the music and then all of a sudden this curtain is opening. We felt a wave of emotion and a wave of memory and a wave of past. We were walking to that George Michael song that Gianni used a lot at his shows and I sort of realized that everyone was gone. Gianni was gone and George Michael was gone and my youth was gone. The fashion world is not made of melancholy and nostalgia but it was a bit of melancholy for me.
So many people who many not have known much about Gianni Versace or his death are rediscovering him because of the new season of American Crime Story. What are your memories of the designer?
He was a very special person. In a personal way, for me Gianni was very important because he took me in when I had two pictures in my book and I was not famous at all. He was a great help in my career. In a general way, he loved women and he loved strong women. The women of Versace were always strong, powerful, sexy femme fatales. And he liked us to be like that, to be incredibly powerful on the stage. He gave us the music, he gave us the clothes, he gave us everything.
Donatella is the same - they just treated us like we were part of his family. Being young and fragile, like you can be at that age, it was great to be in that family. They treated us like we were princesses. I’ll never forget that. And also what a shock the way he died and the fact that he was killed. It was just so brutal and so horrible. Gianni was so close and then all of a sudden he was gone. I have a deep admiration for Donatella and her brother Santo. Because she kept everything together, she kept the house, she kept the name, she kept doing everything the way her brother would have done it. And still she made it motherly and she made it her own way. So she’s in my heart as well.
What’s the difference between the role of the First Lady in France and the United States?
It’s very different. American people, they like to be very clear about things. American people don’t like opacity, it’s not in their traditions. So the American First Lady usually has a real position. She can have people working with her, she can do whatever causes she would like to do. She can do something she believes in. In France they like to have the First Lady representing the country but you can’t really give her a precise place. The new French President he tried to give his wife a precise position but the people are not reacting well to that. It’s a complicated thing.
But I believe that the person that really counts is the person that is elected. During campaign for election, the spouse goes but they don’t talk to the people - they just appear. That’s what I did when I was campaigning with my husband. But I noticed that Michelle Obama and Melanie Trump they have to give a speech from time to time. And you know it’s not so easy to give a speech when it’s not your job.
Did you ever perform while you were First Lady?
I sang sometimes for promotion but I couldn’t go on tour. That wasn’t possible with the security, then you have to bring police with you everywhere and it costs so much money, it’s embarrassing. I waited till my husband was done and then I toured again.
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