RFI/Musique: The thing that struck me most about Auguri on a first listen was that you sing a lot more on this album than you did on previous ones …
Dominique A: Yes, and it feels fantastic! Singing's a rediscovered pleasure.

So, for you, singing was a pleasure you felt you'd lost somewhere along the way?
Well, I've always considered Remué to be an album which revolves around singing. But in actual fact, I was totally reined in and restricted when I recorded the vocals on that album. I didn't really let myself go. So this time round I decided I didn't want to spend so much time analysing and picking out the faults in my voice. I've learnt to accept things in my voice that I don't like very much, because if I systematically stop and pick out faults all the time and re-record till everything's perfect, I risk losing other things such as the powerful emotional charge of a raw take.
It was Remué which really helped me accept my voice as it is, in its entirety. The recording sessions had been difficult enough. They were like a vocal slalom course at times. But things were even worse for me when I had to perform songs from the album live, because I had to get up on stage and expose myself. You know, assume the position of lead singer with a group behind me – and, to be honest, the songs just weren't suited to that. So I think it was natural after Remué that I felt like moving on to something more expansive, where I could let my voice go and sing without stopping to question myself all the time.

Your new album makes it clear you don't belong to the "variété" world of the musical mainstream. In fact, Auguri is the complete opposite of your 1995 album, La Mémoire neuve, on which you seemed to be moving towards a more consensual form of music …
I think La Mémoire neuve is really an album which stands apart from my other work. And I must say it seems to be more logical to do an album like Auguri now than it did to record La Mémoire neuve back then. It's true that I experienced a bit of a problem working out what my relationship to "variété" was at one stage of my career – but it's not a problem I have any more! The essential thing is to be at peace with your music. I'm not into the idea of leading some sort of crusade over what people should and shouldn't play!

Auguri doesn't exactly have an upbeat feel to it, does it?
Well, I'm glad you said that! It's funny, but different people have reacted very differently to the album. People have seen all kinds of things in it. There's no standard response, which is good because the standard response with Remué was that everyone turned round and told me it was "heavy" and "leaden". But there's been much more of a varied response to Auguri - someone even told me they found it "sunny"!

Nevertheless, there's a biting irony about the song Les chanteurs sont mes amis (Singers are my friends), which explicitly targets the music business …
Explicitly, yes, but if you look closely, the target's actually very specific. The song, which has two distinct parts to it, isn't just about the music business in general. I'm not talking about the whole of the showbiz world, I'm talking about my friends, people who're more or less the same age as me, who started out the same time I did ... Basically, if I step back and take an objective look at things, what I see going on around me is pretty much the same kind of behaviour we used to rebel against ourselves when we were a bit younger. But the second part of the song is very different. In that part of the song I really express my love of certain voices and my respect for certain singers.

Auguri is the first album where the songs you've written touch so closely on your own life …
Maybe, that's the case, I don't know. Some people have told me they find certain songs hard, or a bit brutal even. But, personally, I don't think that's the case.

At times >Auguri almost seems to give you an opening for some sort of catharsis …
Well, I think all songs are a form of catharsis, even the most lightweight, anecdotal ones like Ses yeux brûlent. But, having said that, you can't say whether something's cathartic or not until after you've written it. When I sit down to write a song I never know whether the act of writing is going to be a cathartic experience or not. But I think if you're going to say songwriting's cathartic, you have to say all songs are.
Listening to the song En secret, you can't help but imagine all sorts of dark, depressing things going on in your life ...
Well, let me reassure you, that song's got nothing to do with anything I've lived through in my personal life. The whole thing's total fiction. Actually, I only realised where En secret had come from once I'd finished it. It was inspired by the film Trois huit, which I'd seen shortly before. Trois huit is a film which deals with harassment in the workplace and looks at the ambiguous relationship between tormentor and victim.
What happened was, while I was working on the melody to the song, the words "in secret" kept coming into my head. And it only took around ten or fifteen minutes to develop a storyline from there. Unlike a lot of my other songs, I don't think I can say what my exact intention was at the moment of writing. The only thing I can say in retrospect is that the song was inspired by a certain thing, but there wasn't any kind of premeditation involved.

There's the same kind of melancholy atmosphere on the song Où conduit l’escalier too ...
Yes, I suppose so, but looking back on things today I feel that song sounds a bit forced. Où conduit l’escalier was inspired by a collection of short stories by Alexeï Remizov, entitled Où finit l’escalier. I got the idea of the title and the lyrics from the book.
What I was trying to do in that song, in fact was to push 'realism' as far as it would go, then venture beyond that into a sort of 'hyper-realism'. There's quite a long drawn-out musical section in the middle of the song. And I think that allows you to imagine the scene after things have been slugged out … It's true that the language in the song is a bit crude here and there, but I couldn't help it. That's what came out when I was writing.

Are you critical when it comes to your own albums?
Yes, I think I am. But I'm generally more amazed that I've actually finished them. I consider my albums as personal victories really. I have a lot of affection for them all – even La Mémoire neuve - so I don't regard any of them as 'enemies'. In fact, I've always invested enough of myself in each album that I could never really hate any of them.

The funny thing about the current rock scene, compared to earlier incarnations, is that these days singers and musicians are as cultivated and intellectually aware as the critics. Do you ever sit down and try to analyse what's going on on your albums yourself?
No, I would never claim to understand my own work. On the other hand, I think I am capable of standing back from my work fairly rapidly and making an objective judgement on a song. But I have to admit, my principle rule of thumb when it comes to judging a song is weighing up the amount of pleasure I got out of making it. When I sit down and write a song like Antonia, for instance, where everything just seems to flow naturally, I don't try and analyse or fight anything. In cases like that, I tend to suspend my critical judgement. In general, I've noticed that getting pleasure out of creating a song is always a guarantee of quality.

Interview: Bertrand Dicale
Translation: Julie Street
Homepage photo courtesy: Labels

Dominique A: Auguri (Labels)