RFI Musique: Le sacre des Lemmings et autres contes de la lisière (The Ritual of the Lemmings and Other Tales From the Threshold). How did you come up with an album title like that?
Tété: Well, basically the idea was to find a title that would link all the different tracks on the album and reflect its central theme: otherness. One of the fundamental questions I was trying to address is whether, through our apparent inability to interact together, the human race isn’t rushing headlong into disaster – hence the image of the Lemmings rushing off the cliff*! That’s the fundamental question that runs beneath the surface throughout the entire album. We’re in a situation where the greatest number defines the norm. And the invisible barrier that exists between this corpus and the minority satellite populations spinning off on their own is what I call the Threshold.

So what are the songs on your new album about?
They’re like a play of mirrors reflecting off one another. The corpus – or the main body of society I’m talking about – is filtered through the prism of my eyes, the way I see the world. It’s a very subjective take on things, a very biased view of the world. Over the past couple of years, events on the national and international scene have been unfolding at a very intense rate. Attention has been focused on a certain number of news stories and, as both a singer and a citizen of the world, I’ve lived through certain things on a daily basis. Up until now, I’d never found the right angles to approach these things in my songs.… The songs are basically a sort of chronicle of events. I don’t want to give away all the keys to how to interpret them, though. I like the idea of leaving some space for interaction. My job is to throw all these ideas into the air, not to come up with solutions. 

The theme of identity seems to come up time and again on your new album…
I think as you get older the question of identity becomes more and more crucial. If I want to interact with others, I need to know who I am, what I am, what France is today, what the Republican pact actually means… It was really important for me to approach these questions in a cryptic, coded way so that I could keep a bit of distance on things and not stigmatise anybody in the process…There’s always a moment when you’re writing that you have to shut yourself away from everyone and commune with yourself to find out what you want to do, what you want to express. There’s obviously a slightly therapeutic side to writing. If you want to share your experiences with others, that means finding the right words and ultimately clarifying your own ideas about things.

When you’re writing a song do you compose the lyrics and the melody at the same time?
Gainsbourg used to say that songwriting is a minor art and I think that’s true. There’s a point with a song where you can always cheat because it’s led by a melody and there are other forms of artifice involved. Writing songs certainly doesn’t require the same kind of discipline that writing a book or a play does. Personally, I like the idea of that discipline. I like to think that someone who doesn’t know me or my work could flick through the lyric booklet accompanying my album out of curiosity and find that - even if he doesn’t agree with the subject matter or the angles of the songs – there’s a certain coherence in the texts… I think sometimes when you’re too direct about things it encroaches on the idea you’re trying to get across and that can end up being totally counterproductive. I deliberately chose to filter things through the prism of a tale and that dictated everything right down to the suit I wear and the Mr Fairplay image on the cover. These songs are stories – they don’t come from me, they come from the character on the cover!

Musically speaking, is it fair to say you’re still situated somewhere between music from the Mississippi Delta and Motown pop?
Yes, absolutely. But I’ve also been influenced by the approach The Beatles took in the studio, the way they made simple pop songs or folk songs based on piano-vocals or guitar-vocals and behind that you’ve got these very classic arrangements by George Martin. On this album, I wanted to go back and rediscover the essence of my songs. As I worked on it, I integrated new influences such as classical music, Klezmer and Italian revolutionary songs. All these sounds are totally charged with emotion – that’s the link between them all.

You produced and co-arranged your new album yourself. Did that change your musical approach at all?
This is my third album and I wanted to be more involved in the arrangements this time round and come up with ideas. That’s why I chose to work with David Hadjadj who, amongst other things, happens to produce music for films. What happened was I went along with my songs and my ideas and he helped me get things into shape. My new role on this album is a natural progression… I was basically working with the idea of writing simple guitar-vocals pieces that I’d be happy playing on my own at home and would also feel like getting out and recreating live on stage. Working like that meant the stakes were different this time round, there was less self-censorship going on. The basic idea was to enjoy myself and get out there live on stage - those were the main objectives behind the new album.

* Every four years, following a population explosion, these small rodents found in northern latitudes undertake mass migrations where most of them die. A natural accident ? A cull orchestrated by predators? Or mass suicide? The lemmings’ ritual remains a mystery.