Do you feel above the commercial requirements?
No, only because a record is very expensive to make and it is a bit ridiculous to waste money even if it isn't mine but that of a production company. I set a very sensible objective that assures a balance. Beyond that, I don't have a frenzied ambition for success. Since I haven't released an album in ten years, I don't know who will buy this one, still I trust the people who have recently bought my books. I think that hard core fans must want to know what this record is.

You have always said that there was a complementarity in you between literature and music. But is there competition between these two types of writing?
Already, there isn't a hierarchy. I don't place, which seems obvious, the novel above music. Even, I can say that I have learned a lot from music to write novels: the precision, the conciseness of the writing. I have always thought that there was a complementarity of expression, one quick, the other long; one linked to time, to the period in which we live " the music ", whereas the novel has complete freedom: Marguerite Yourcenar wrote "les Mémoires d'Hadrien" almost thirty years ago , which takes place in ancient times, and it is still an up to date novel. When you practice the two activities, there is a real complementarity.
What is more, from a practical point of view, it is very pleasant to change milieu, company, culture. Singers and writers don't have the same approach at all about time, current events or travelling. It is very entertaining to go from one to the other and at the same time, I feel good in both milieux. I really like the solitude of writing and I like to go against this temperament and work with a team, with musicians and sound technicians.

You know who reads your books today; you know who listened to your records ten years ago. Do you know who is going to listen to this one?
In my wildest hopes a mix of the two, plus a category of the population who doesn't even know that I make records. The people who read "La Dérive des sentiments" when they were eighteen years old are twenty-six or twenty-seven today, and they didn't know my previous album. At book fairs I have seen people who didn't know that I was a singer and others who discovered that I write. The ideal is that the two meet, that people know everything.

Having two different publics for music and novels, doesn't this give you the impression of having two lives?
No, because I work at uniting them, to make it that each one knows what the other is contributing. I was taught this by Brassens who one day told me that the first time that television invited a singer to sing at 8:30p.m. it was him. He thought that it was because he was known and when he sang "L'Auvergnat", the host asked him if it was a new song. He told me "You see, we never make it. We must always think that people don't know." That has remained in my thoughts.

"Intempestives" is a rather unexpected album, with machines and electronic programming.
There are guitars too. Knowing this, I have always liked electronics. There were already some in the last two albums, and in 1977, we used the first synthesisers on the market. For this one I really wanted to use everything electronic that we could and not only the sounds. I write my books on the computer and I use the cut and paste functions a lot. The same on a record, I like to take a group of sounds and move them around. In a song with couplet, refrain, couplet, refrain, I like to be able to put two refrains or two couplets in such or such a place. It is so easy...

Do you listen to a lot of records?
Yes, especially when I am making a record. Writing a novel or a record, it is a constant learning process, I push myself " thank God ", because I sometimes lean towards inertia and laziness. I think that I buy more records and books than necessary, and I like this sort of professional obligation to have to listen and to have to read. I would sometimes like to live with what I've got, what I know or have already heard, but to discover people like Tricky, for example, nourish what I do so much... On the album "Mille et une nuits", there are two notes which come from a track from his last album. By listening to music, I take it upon myself to do other things, and it is the same for novels and this works as it would if I made films.

You are one of the rare people to name your sources so much, your inspiration and your admiration, not only in interviews but in your songs themselves.
I like that very much. Here in "Je me souviens" for example, the first thing is to pay direct tribute to Georges Perec, because it all came from him. I've done this from the beginning, from "Les Gauloises bleues", "Au pays des merveilles de Juliet"... I wanted to put a bibliography in my last novel, like one does for essays to point out all of the books that I had read while writing and that had nourished the novel, but also a discography of movie soundtracks, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Georges Delerue... In the end I didn't do it because I was afraid that it would be taken badly or misunderstood.

Artists usually rather tend to conceal their sources to protect their egos...
Me, I like to gather a lot of things that come from science, literature, music but that transform, obviously, and that one can see or guess if he has the same cultural background. It is almost a game: you can discover the allusions and if you don't find them it doesn't matter. "Au pays des merveilles de Juliet", for example, to take a remote example, starts by "Juliet, you are walking next to the water/your four red wings on your back". The water is in fact, and no one can see this, an allusion to "L'arrache-Coeur" by Boris Vian where the river is red. Then "You sing Alice by Lewis Caroll/ On a tape which is a bit crazy" is because Juliet Berto, with whom I had just made a film, had given me a cassette on which she tells the story of "Alice in Wonderland" to her niece. You see, it is interesting if you decipher everything, but it also works as it is.
On the latest album, the voice sounds on the pre-intro of "Je me souviens" took eight hours of editing. It is very short (thirteen seconds-author's note) but I put Simone Signoret who said to Pivot in her last television appearance:"But what was the question that you asked me?; the word "Liberty" said by Eluard who was reading his poem on the radio : "I have written your name..."; Kennedy who said Ich bin ein Berliner" ; an instant of May 68 found at the soundbank of RTL radio with someone yelling "Watch out! Watch out!", and bam! it's exploding! And two phrases that I use later in the song: Jean Gabin who says "You have beautiful eyes, you know!" in "Quai des brumes", and I have him answered by Jeanne Moreau who says "Kiss me" in "Ascenseur pour l'échafaud". These are the real moments in "Je me souviens", it's not the luck of sounds, it's really my memory...

Is it easier for you to write songs today?
First of all it is never easy to write a song. I wrote many scenarios when I was at film school, I've written ten or so novels and a little more than a hundred songs. And it is an extremely difficult art, with multiple constraints. It is contemporary art par excellence: songs only talk about today. And by growing older, we don't have the same abilities. You need daily training and since I had lost that by only writing novels, I started thinking about this album three years ago. The songs became what I hoped only a year ago, when I started recording them.
In a song, not only must you use the correct words to talk about our time, but also the music and the sound that suits it. The balance of the three is difficult to find. When I was making records every year, in the Seventies and Eighties, this mechanism worked very quickly and very well, without a worry about performance. I said to myself that an unsuccessful record is only a record between a successful one and a future success.