smudie

NADJ has just released a new album, Lasse Vegas, featuring three tracks with my lyrics: the raunchy opener Pick A Card; the languorous eight-minute epic Cactus; and, my personal favourite, Jesus Freak.

As Nadj herself explains on her blog on MySpace, this album has been a long time coming, and has not been without its troubles along the way.

Still, I firmly believe that some things are worth shouting from the rooftops. If there are only a handful of people listening down below, that doesn't mean you should use it as an excuse to say silent, or that you should wait for a bigger crowd to gather. No, sometimes you just need to scream as loud as you can... and see how far your voice will carry.

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Buy Lasse Vegas here or direct from the artist.

Pourpre, the side project of Thomas Charlet from eliotE & the ritournelles, has recorded a version of my song Never.

• Never
  

Manchester: "Sans puissance, le son n'est rien"

Manchester are a band who wear many of their influences on their sleeve - or, rather, in their name.

There's also very much of a Mancunian swagger in the voice of lead singer and guitarist Leslie Kervella, who I first met when she was pushing her way to the front of a VERY long queue for the toilets in the Pop In and proclaiming loudly, "Let me through, let me through - I'm pregnant!"

Now that she's given birth and found time for making music again, the first results of our labours are ready to see the light of day. Smoke Signals is about taking the not-too-subtle hint that it's time to move on, while Grip compares the act of making love to nothing less than climbing a mountain.

Rock on!

• Smoke Signals
• Grip

Have A Good Night 4, released today, is a collection of "lullabies" performed by such rising stars of the French indie scene as Mina Tindle (who will be supporting Beirut on their upcoming European tour), MiLK and Fruit Juice, and eliotE & the Ritournelles (who have teamed up with Rivkah on Wheel of Dreams, a charming little ditty for which I wrote the lyrics), together with a few international guests.

The idea for our song came from eliotE herself, who told me about a dream she often had as a child in which she could "choose" what to dream about using a kind of magic roulette wheel. When she came to me with the idea they already had a vocal melody, which she described as being "a bit like the Andrews sisters", and I tried my best to respect that as I came up with the words.

I got a sneak preview of some of the album's contents a couple of weeks ago when I attended a special kids-only concert held at a playgroup in Montmartre, Paris - hardly the most rock n' roll of venues, I admit, but my daughter and her friend loved it!

• Wheel of Dreams

Sometimes, you need to start afresh.

That's what I told OrangeColumbo, who recently suffered a hard-drive failure on his PC that meant he has lost several months worth of work, including his initial demos of some songs that we'd been working on together, and a hundreds of personal photos, and who knows what else.

I didn't really know what else to say, and I still don't - other than the fact that, since I learned the news a couple of days ago, I've been rediscovering many of the tracks we've written together over the years.

Old songs like Carousel. Great songs like Carousel.

We'll be back, my friend!

• Carousel
  

My friends eliotE & the ritournelles began their European tour with a hometown gig in Paris last night.

You can follow their on-the-road antics on le blog du Bye Bye Ritournelles tour (in French).

I've been making music.

Although I would never really claim to be anything other than a lyricist, I have nonetheless been amusing myself lately by setting some of my old lyrics that never found a home to a series of home-made electronic rhythms. And I've been singing them myself!

Silent Mode is the first demo resulting from these experiments to see the light of day.

I'm only doing this for fun, but if you download the track, I'd certainly be very interested in hearing what you think of it.

• Silent Mode

If you've ever sent a text message in the middle of the night after having one drink too many, this little song is for you.

• A Drunken Text

Someone told me that this song, Curse, serves as a good reminder of the advantages of being single.

That wasn't quite what I had in mind when I wrote it, but who knows? Maybe it does!

• Curse

I suppose it's obvious, but I'll say it anyway: every lyric I write is personal.

Now, that doesn't mean that all of my songs that tell stories are necessarily telling stories about me. It just means that they are personal in the sense that they express how I feel at this moment in time, how I have felt at some point the past, or even how I might feel in some imaginary situation I have not (yet) experienced.

Personal is not a synonym of autobiographical.

This is an important distinction to make when writing words for other people to sing. The people I write for need to feel that our songs belong to them as much as they belong to me.

To put it another way, I sometimes feel more like a film director, creating a scene in which others can act. In this sense, I guess you could say that Never and Leave Me With Your Scent are two of my latest little movies.

• Never
• Leave Me With Your Scent