Barely a year after the release of her first compilation and a series of concerts at the prestigious Salle Gaveau in Paris, Juliette is back in the music news again. The singer has announced she will be returning to the live scene in May, performing at Paris venue Le Grand Rex. Meanwhile, her new album Mutatis Mutandis has just hit French record stores. And a rich and satisfying opus it is with its learned songs and witty lyrics and its boldly original arrangements. Juliette’s new album includes contributions from two French actors, François Morel (who adds a comic interlude) and Guillaume Depardieu (who provides a note of tragedy). Mutatis Mutandis also features everything from chamber music and songs written in alexandrines to orchestral arrangements and techno programmations masterminded by Juliette herself. Another undoubted highlight is Franciscae meae laudes (a musical adaptation of the only Latin poem in Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal).

Besides working on her new album, Juliette has been busy with a number of other activities. These include presenting a regular show on French radio station France Musiques every Saturday. "I get to do what I want for an entire hour,” she says gleefully, “One minute I’m playing Hendrix and the next it’s a piece by Mozart!" We hooked up with the famous music bulimic and asked her a few questions about her new album.

RFI Musique: This is the first album where you’ve written all the lyrics, music and arrangements yourself. Was that an easy undertaking or not ?
Juliette: Oh, believe me, I worked! I go to a great deal of trouble when I‘m writing songs. There are some things that spring into your mind readymade, but a lot of others need serious work to knock them into shape. One of the most difficult things is not so much actually getting a song down on paper, but having a good solid idea in the first place... That’s why I often get my inspiration from things that exist already. Take Il s'est passé quelque chose, that song comes from a short story by Dino Buzzati. It’s as if the scenario were already written and I was doing the remake! In reality, no one ever invents anything new. All stories have already been told since the beginning of time. The only question left for us is what camera angle we’re going to work from and where we’re going to place the actors!

Do you write your songs with pen and paper or a computer keyboard?
On a typewriter – and a lot by hand, too, because I spend so much of my time actually playing. The way I function is I work on everything at the same time. The music can give me an idea for the lyrics, or vice versa with the lyrics and the arrangements. They can spark off an idea for the music... Actually, what happens is I often start off using any old lyrics when I’m working on an idea for the music. The reason La Fantaisie héroïque is written in alexandrines is because I originally based the music on the confession scene from Phèdre. I had this idea I was going to do a drum’n’bass version of Racine, but in the end I decided not to be lazy and write my own lyrics instead!

A great many of your songs revolve around the past. There’s an intriguing song on your new album called Une lettre oubliée (Forgotten Letter) which takes us back to the First World War. Would you say you have a certain penchant for historic stories?
Well, to begin with I’d actually thought about setting that song in a much more recent period. I’d thought maybe the era of the concentration camps. But the song needed there to have been a pretty long lapse of time before the girl re-reads the letter and wonders who wrote it. Une lettre oubliée is a song about memory and how memory works in a very selective way. Maybe the girl’s wiped out the memory of this particular love affair because we human beings are capable of doing that, of effacing major, traumatic moments in our lives. The song was inspired by the letters that got sent from the trenches in the First World War. I was really moved by the fate of these 20-year-old soldiers who got sent off to the war and lost their lives.

How did you come to choose Guillaume Depardieu to partner you on Une lettre oubliée?
It was like casting a film really. Une lettre oubliée didn’t originally start out as a duet, but when I played the demo of the song to friends they all said they didn’t understand the song properly with me singing both the voice from the past and the present. But once the idea of doing a duet had come up, I knew I didn’t want to do the song with a singer, even with a singer I respected a lot, someone with a great voice – like Marc Lavoine, for instance. There’d just have been too many connotations that way. So I decided on using an actor instead. The only problem was, the voices that are most recognisable in French cinema all belong to mature actors and I needed a younger man for my soldier. I thought about using Vincent Cassel but, given the roles he usually plays on screen, he’s the kind of soldier who’d end up coming back from the war! And if his girl had dared to forget him while he’d been away, he’d have given her a couple of black eyes when he got home! (Laughs)

Then one day someone suggested Guillaume Depardieu and it seemed obvious he was the man for the job. I think Guillaume’s really handsome and he’s an impeccable actor, too. He brings this sort of hyper-sensitivity to his roles. The other thing about Guillaume is that he’s familiar with a certain type of French ‘chanson.’ He used to hang out with Barbara (when she was alive) and even wrote a song for her. I had pretty much the same impression of Guillaume as everyone else seems to have. I thought he was this ‘enfant terrible’ who’s always on the TV and in the scandal columns in the papers. I thought he was this totally rock'n’roll guy. But when he came into the studio, something very special happened. He was terrified about the whole thing but by the time he’d finished his first take everyone in the studio was in tears!

Juliette Mutatis Mutandis (Polydor-Universal) 2005