On the title track of his new album, Julien Clerc is in pensive mode, wondering "Où s’en vont les avions/ Quand ils s’en vont?" ("Where do planes fly/ When they fly away?") The question might have sounded ridiculous on anyone else's lips, but somehow Monsieur Clerc has managed to turn this naïve sense of wonderment into his trademark. And he appears more than happy to continue seeing the world through the eyes of a child - despite the fact that this year marks the 40^th anniversary of his career! At an age when he could, by rights, have been grumpy, bitter and disillusioned, Julien Clerc is still celebrating the joys of falling in love and being consumed by passion.

As naïve questions appear to be the order of the day, we could begin by asking the great Monsieur Clerc our own little question: "Why does he go on recording?" Given the fact that Clerc classics have dominated the French airwaves for four decades now, it can hardly be for the money. And it's unlikely to be for the girls these days, either. Julien Clerc's dark, good looks first seduced the ladies back in the late '60s, so the core of his fan base are mostly mothers now - some of them even grandmothers!

On his last album, Double enfance (released in 2005), France's favourite crooner played the autobiographical card, revealing a number of intimate details about his personal life. This time round, Clerc does not shy away from the personal but no overall theme dominates the songwriting on this new album. The twelve tracks on Où s’en vont les avions branch off in very different directions, none of them resembling the others in any way. Meanwhile, as Julien Clerc sings of love, passion, women and world events with youthful feeling - and occasionally, the detachment of the older, wiser divorcee - a hint of Chopin creeps into the piano and overt Beatles influences make themselves felt in the orchestration.

For the element that holds all the disparate songwriting threads on Où s’en vont les avions together is melody. And not just any melody, but the special Clerc take on melody - that innate knack for serving up two soft, slow-tempo songs followed by a faster, snappier number! The novel thing about Julien Clerc's new album is that he chose to work with two producers at the helm this time round. First up, Benjamin Biolay - a studio whizzkid renowned for working with gut instinct and placing the emphasis on speed and spontaneity. Biolay's working methods were tempered by those of his opposite number, Bénédicte Schmitt, a female producer and sound engineer famous for her slowly-honed, meticulous approach.

While Julien Clerc avoids mining the no-holds-barred autobiographical vein he opened up on his last album, Où s’en vont les avions does reveal a more intimate side to the singer. Clerc chose to accompany himself on several tracks on Double enfance, but this time round he decided to record all the piano parts on his new album himself. "A bit like on demos, sometimes at the same time as I recorded my vocals - and then I gave these to Benjamin to write the orchestrations," Clerc told us this spring whilst putting the finishing touches to Où s’en vont les avions. The arrangements on this new album reflect the neo-Beatles, neo-Gainsbourg sound for which Biolay has become famous, but also the eighties-style rigour of Bénédicte Schmitt. Given complete 'carte blanche', the two producers managed to create twelve independent tracks held together by a musical unity not always present on the singer's previous albums.

Clerc's vocals account for much of the charm on Où s’en vont les avions, of course. And this time round the singer surpasses himself. Rarely has Clerc's voice put such energy into feeling, such precision into emotion, his vocals expressing every possible nuance of love, tenderness, hope, suffering and solitude. With Où s’en vont les avions, the singer proves that he has a voice that goes way beyond his female fan base, a voice that can reach out and strike a chord in the listener's heart so that - almost in spite of ourselves - we find ourselves swept along in his wake, indulging in the same flights of fancy, dreaming the same dreams. 

Talking of dreaming the same dreams, Clerc invited one of his closest peers, Gérard Manset, to write material for Où s’en vont les avions. Both singers actually released their debut singles on 9 May 1968, but had never worked together before now. Their collaboration after all these years has produced two absolute musical gems: the delightfully light and fanciful Petite fée and the deeper, darker Frère - the essence of Julien Clerc lying perhaps somewhere between the two, between the fanciful romantic and the gritty realist.

Meanwhile, celebrity spotters have noted that Julien Clerc's new album includes Déranger les pierres (a song featuring music by Clerc and lyrics by the French First Lady Carla Bruni, who included her version of the song on her own album Comme si de rien n’était released this summer). Julien Clerc also serves up his own take on Restons amants (the title track of Maxime Le Forestier's latest album). However, Clerc has considerably broadened his songwriting palette on his new album, requesting lyrics from Gérard Duguet-Grasser (discovered on his last album), David McNeil, Jean-Loup Dabadie and Benjamin Biolay. "I'm interested in reaching out across the generations!" he says, a smile playing across his eternally boyish face.