RFI/Musique: Listening to your new album, with its recording sessions carried out under "live" conditions and its brilliant touches of improvisation, one might be forgiven for thinking this album marks the return of Mister Swing…
Michel Jonasz: No… (Jonasz pauses reflectively) No, I don't see it like that. I always find it a bit strange, you know, when people talk to me about the "return" of this or that in my work. With my last album a lot of people turned round and said, "Oh yes! This marks a return to blah blah blah..". I honestly don't understand what they mean by "return" though, because I never had the impression I'd been away anywhere else! I think there's a natural evolution in any artist's life and that's all there is to it!

In that case, maybe it's better to say that your new album features certain tracks in the same vein as Mister Swing. Où vont les rêves? includes a number of wonderful ballads and pointedly acoustic songs…
Well, I don't know if I'd agree with that remark either really – because if you say "Oh, there are some wonderful ballads on your new album," that means there weren't any wonderful ballads on the last one… So you have to be a bit careful really… I could take what you say the wrong way if I wanted to… (Jonasz laughs, rather nervously).
I'd say the point where I do agree with you, though, is that Mister Swing was a live album recorded with a pretty pared-down backing band like this one, really, without guitar. What I wanted to do on Où vont les rêves? was try and capture a bit of that live spirit, in fact. That's the way I recorded it in any case – I set myself a very strict set of rules to work within. The main thing was there were to be no retakes, we wouldn't have the right to play anything again once we'd recorded it. In a way it was like forcing ourselves to treat the studio the same way as a live venue – the only difference obviously being that as there was no audience we were allowed to rehearse things a bit before we played. I think that's what makes the album close to Mister Swing in some way. It's that feeling of "right, we're all here together, playing together and having fun!"

You get the feeling listening to Où vont les rêves? that Steve Gadd was forced to swap his drumsticks for brush sticks and Etienne M’Bappé was told not to slap his bass strings. Did you deliberately set out to create such a soft, velvet atmosphere?
Well, there were no arrangers involved on this album at all. There were just the four of us – and we didn't get together much beforehand either! I met up with the pianist to discuss things maybe three or four times because that seemed important to me. But Etienne and Steve didn't know the songs at all. The way we worked when we went into the studio was that I'd start to hum the basic melody line to one of the songs – and I never got the chance to finish, because they'd jump right in and start playing before I got to the end!
And I have to say it was a pretty magical experience. I mean, what is a song after all? Basically, it's a melody, a bunch of harmonies and a tempo… When we were working in the studio together things just fused. We didn't have to talk about how we should go about things. But, you know… it's a strange experience, too. Because how come you end up playing the notes you do? Why those ones and not others? Well, at the end of the day I have to admit I still don't know…
I guess at the end of the day I have to agree with Steve Gadd, who says it's all about being swept away by the music. It's the music that dictates what you have to play and that's the spirit of this albumreally, the fact of being together, functioning as a whole. The key to that is confidence - you have to be able to let go at some point and just play. And what is it that makes all that sound harmonious even though we're each out on a limb doing our own thing? It's the fact that we all listen to what the other guys are doing!

While the music on your new album was more or less improvised, you did spend a long time working on the lyrics, didn't you? Where did you get the inspiration for a song like Vieux Style (Old Style)?
Well, it's basically a song about a guy who's stuck in the 60s, a guy who's completely wrapped up in his nostalgia for this golden era and who doesn't actually like the age we're living in now. The 60's are still his whole world, you know, he drives 60s cars and listens to 60s records and stuff…
I love the 60s. They were a really important period in my own life, but I wouldn't say I feel nostalgic for them in any way. I suppose I could feel a bit nostalgic for the days when I was 15, because I went through my teens in the 60s. But it's not really nostalgia, it's more the sort of tender emotion you experience looking at an old photograph or something. But I'm not sitting there saying to myself "Oh, those were the days. Everything was so much better back then!"… I get a lot more out of the present or what the future holds in store for me than I do out of the past.
People have often said my songs sound a bit nostalgic, that there's a certain melancholy in there somewhere. And I admit I do use it in my songs sometimes because it's a good way of getting an emotion across. But nostalgia is always a means to an end with me, it's not something I personally live on a day-to-day basis!

And what about the song Grand-Père that tells the story of this amazing old guy still in love with his wife after all these years. Is that based on your own grandfather or is that how you imagine yourself in later life?
The song's really a mix of several different life stories and experiences. Songwriters put their imagination to work on that raw material, too. I've always been really touched when I see couples who've been together for years and years. They know each other inside out and they have this very special way of looking at one another - you can see the same love in their eyes. It's terrible because when one of them dies life comes to a complete halt for the other - and I know it's terrible because that's something I've seen for myself. (Pause)
Grand-Père is a song I started to write about a dozen years ago. Well, I had the starting lines in any case, the bit about the grandmother "ironing grandfather's collar-less shirts while he dozes in the corner/ sixty years of love spent in the light." That was all I had really, but it was enough. The rest came later… I think that's because the song deals with a subject very close to my own heart. It was so important to me that it needed time to develop – I couldn't have sat down and written it all at once! Maybe somewhere down the line I felt there ought to be a bit of decency too… It was something that was simply too heavy to talk about rightaway.

Would you say there's a unifying theme that binds your albums together? Do you feel that the songs weave in and out of one another in some way?
Well, over the years I've come to realise that every album tells a different story. That doesn't mean to say I insist on having a narrative thread running through things every time. The way I work is sit down and write at least 30 songs and then I slowly whittle things down until I'm left with 12 or 14…
But even though I wasn't conscious of this album telling a story when I was working on it, I do recognise it now. That's something I came to realise very late in the day, though. It wasn't until it was nearly finished and I was putting the songs in order that I saw the story taking shape, but… no, I'd rather not say what it is! (Jonasz smiles) Maybe there's a certain character who crops up in the songs – the guy who's stuck in the 60s, the rock group on the rhythm’n blues song, the grandfather or the attachment to the world of childhood on songs like Je pense à elle tous les jours and Le Blues or Où vont les rêves?which is about someone looking back and reflecting on what he's done with his life. I think there is a certain story there, but it's not a finite one. Anyone can listen to the album and build their own story around the songs!

Michel Jonasz / Où vont les rêves? (EMI Capitol 2002)