Sitting in the Paris HQ of Exclaim, the label which has just released Lumière dans le noir in France, Zachary Richard gives a mighty yawn and flings up his arms in an extended stretch. The Cajun star, dressed in blue from head to toe, is still suffering from jetlag and the consequences of a gruelling promotional tour that has taken him all the way from Louisiana via Quebec, where he enjoys iconic status, to France, where the public appear to be gradually forgetting him.

In bygone days Zachary Richard’s Travailler c’est trop dur was a big hit in France, catapulting him onto the stage of the legendary Olympia in Paris and getting him major billing at French music festivals such as Les Francofolies de La Rochelle. Zachary was even made a “Chevalier des arts et lettres” in France, but these days he admits he would "love to be a bit more successful here. Can you imagine I sell less records in France than I do in the Netherlands! But I realise that would require a real physical undertaking on my part. I’d have to be prepared to stay in France for a while." Preparations already seem well underway for this, in fact, what with the release of his accomplished new album and a forthcoming French tour announced as early as spring 2008.

Right now, Zachary has his mind focused on the past rather than the future, as he attempts to recall the various stages in the long gestation of Lumière dans le noir. The majority of the songs on the album were actually ready back in the summer of 2005, but Zachary confesses he felt the need to rethink them all in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. The hurricane wreaked havoc in several American states, principally Lousiana, at the end of that summer, killing almost 1,000 and leaving a million people homeless. Hurricane Katrina had direct consequences for Zachary Richard’s album, too. "It should have been a classic recording session in Montreal,” he says, “But everything suddenly got turned on its head. I got involved in collecting funds for the victims, mostly for the musicians, in fact."

Zachary also threw himself into organising fund-raising concerts with a vengeance. "We set up a lot of different projects in America,” he says, “But then I realised nothing was happening over in France. So I got on the phone and spoke to Francis Cabrel, a singer who’s turned to American music in his work. Francis is a man who’s got his heart in the right place. I knew he’d already organised a fund-raising concert for victims of the AZF disaster (in Toulouse)." A few weeks after the phone call, a fund-raising gig was organised at Le Palais des Congrès, in Paris. On 7 November 2005, thousands of fans packed the venue out to capacity to watch Francis Cabrel and Zachary Richard on stage, joined by a host of other French stars including Alain Souchon, Sanseverino and the group Paris Combo.

And thus it was that a note of geographical and temporal unpredictability crept into the making of Lumière dans le noir. "Thanks to the whole technology revolution I was able to record different bits of the album everywhere over a really long period of time,” says Zachary, "That was something I’d obviously never been able to do before." Zachary’s album comes complete with an accompanying booklet which reads like a storybook for adults and is packed with informative copy. We learn that the tracks on the album were recorded in different cities, different countries, even at times different continents. And collaborations with different artists span an equally impressive spectrum.

Francis Cabrel guests on the duet La promesse cassée (dedicated to the victims of Hurricane Katrina) and Stéphane Sanseverino provides his distinctive guitar accompaniment on La Ballade de DL-8-153 (a song about saving Beluga whales). Meanwhile, Ani DiFranco and Isabelle Boulay contribute vocals to the opening track Dans mon rêve and Le Souvenir, a song Zachary describes as having been "written for Beirut." Add to this prestigious mix, trumpet courtesy of Wynton Marsalis and guitar from Dylan collaborator Freddy Koella and you get a taste of the high musical standards on Lumière dans le noir.

These guest collaborators add a sophisticated, modern edge to the arrangements, overriding Zachary’s better-known penchant for traditional sounds. He is, after all, renowned as an ardent defender of all things Cajun*. Lumière dans le noir was produced in New Orleans "as further proof of our commitment and support for the locals" and mixed by Mike Napolitano. And Napolitano does a superb job of pulling its fourteen tracks coherently together over a mix of folk, blues, African and Caribbean rhythms thrown together with a hint of of Cajun sounds, country music, jazzy guitars and gospel-style backing vocals.

Zachary, who describes himself as "a son of ‘68, Woodstock Nation and protest culture in general", injects his new album with his usual revolutionary zeal. But Lumière dans le noir is no cold-blooded political tract as one listen to Ô Jésus, a haunting track about the Rwandan genocide, proves. "You have to make a distinction between songwriting and propaganda,” its author insists, “What you have to get across first and foremost in a song is emotion. When I sing I’m trying to work magic, not politics. But if that magic spills over and serves ideas close to my heart, then so much the better!" Ideas and emotions are shared freely with "all those who have ever felt dark despair prowling outside their door."  As the album title says, Zachary Richard is a man on a mission to bring a little light into your darkness.