Barely two years after La Vie de château, Art Mengo resurfaces on the French music scene with Entre mes guillemets, a new album full of tender, melancholy ballads penned by Marc Estève, Marie Nimier and Clarika – and Art himself! Featuring wonderfully light, airy arrangements, the eleven tracks on the album appear to be written expressly for the stage. And, in fact, less than a year after his last tour, Monsieur Mengo is set to take to the road again at the end of March.

RFI Musique: You seem to have spent a great deal less time making this album than you did the last one…
Art Mengo: I put six years of my life into La Vie de château! This time round, I just wanted to take a pitstop, fill up with new songs and get back out on the road again. I played the final date of my last tour in May 2005 and announced to everyone that I'd have a new album ready within six months. That certainly changed the way I work. I have to admit, I used a method I don't like very much, but it proved to be very effective – and that was deliberately frustrating myself! Given that the last tour included about 100 dates, there was never enough time to sit down and write new material. When we finally wrapped up the concerts, I immediately grabbed my stuff and threw myself into songwriting with a vengeance. That way, everything that needed to come out came out. I totally let off steam!

The arrangements on your new songs are really light and airy, as if they'd been deliberately pared down to play live on stage…
Well, what happened was, I recorded the songs with the same band I used on tour, apart from the guitarist. I find the most difficult thing in this business is actually talking about music. I'm not really into talking in technical terms like playing in 'diminished seventh' or 'ninth'… I prefer to keep things simple, just saying whether a chord's open or closed. Otherwise you have to waste all this time in rehearsal and concerts and soundchecks getting everyone speaking the same jargon… But having been out on the road together, playing 100 or so dates, we'd got to the stage where we were all communicating perfectly. When I tried out the new songs with the band I felt like we'd already reached the soundcheck stage! It's certainly true that I wanted songs that could easily be transposed to the stage because from now on that's where it's all happening for me.

What does that mean exactly?
What it means is I used to love working with machines and creating in the intimacy of the studio – I still do, in fact! But over time I've come to realise that the sensation can be even stronger in a live setting, because I'm much more comfortable up on stage now. I'm aware I can be pretty effective behind a microphone when we get out there live, and right now I'm at a stage in my life where I need to get out there and meet people. Then when I get home I get an urge to rework a song and take things even further to make it even better for the fans who come and see me. That's an excellent way of boosting inspiration, believe me!

It's taken a while for you to feel at ease on stage though, hasn't it?
I didn't really feel in my element to begin with. I was a bit scared of going out on tour, in fact. But I came to discover the joys of performing live with Croire qu'un jour in 1998, even though that album didn't actually get that much attention. I got a real feeling of well-being up on stage that I'd never experienced before.

I belong to a generation where things were done very differently, pretty much back to front, in fact. You used to get pushed out on the live circuit without ever having done a live performance in your life! I belong to the good old synthesiser/machine generation where you learnt how to operate a studio - choosing which mikes you were going to use and how to record takes and stuff - before I learnt how to do a live show and promote myself. But working with people like Henri Salvador and Juliette Gréco, I came to realise that you could actually grow old on stage. It was Salvador and Gréco who showed me the way.

Entre mes guillemets is also significant in that this is the first time in your career that you've written the lyrics for your songs. The new album features one song you co-wrote with Marc Estève and two solo efforts…
I've always loved words, the sheer musicality of them. But I'm not going to turn round and turn everything upside down now. I love words because you can set them to music. That's what interests me, it's a word's relationship to music that attracts me towards it in the first place. It's a logical process. But with the new album, for the first time in my life, words and music came into my head together as a block. I think it was a case of the songwriter in me being forced into action because of the deadline. I'm not sure whether if I'd had another six months to make the album I wouldn't have ended up falling for someone else's songs and putting my own to one side!

On the title track Entre mes guillemets, one of the songs you wrote yourself, you sing "I'm your out-of-fashion lover." Is this meant to be some kind of self-portrait? 
Well, it's certainly true to say that the young generation get more talked about these days! I guess I had my time when I got a bit more talked about. So yes, I'm a bit out of fashion right now, but I think that suits me. I think I can be justifiably proud of the fact that I'm still here after seventeen years – even though the song you're referring to is actually about something else!

Art Mengo Entre mes guillemets (Polydor-Universal) 2006
French tour begins on 29 March 2006