In a few weeks, Suzane will be on the boards of the Olympia in Paris for the second time in six months. But the French singer-songwriter, who has been a sensation at home for three years with her socially connected electropop music, is about to have a “first date” with the Quebec public. And she hopes it won’t be the last.
“I love the idea of starting over,” she tells us, sitting at a Montreal café. I hope there will be people to come to this really precious first meeting. I hope my music will speak to them. »
We met Suzane earlier this week, a few days before the show she will present this Saturday at Studio TD. She was barely seated when the warm singer told us that she came to Quebec as a tourist six years ago to visit the sister of her lover. It was her first big trip outside of France, during which she simmered her first album Toï Toï – a song, Pas beaux, was even born during a long hike to Mont Mégantic.
Like artists like Angèle, Suzane first became known on social networks before achieving immense success with her first album in 2020. The same year, the singer, who has accumulated millions of plays online, received the Victory of Stage Revelation, then she was selected as a female performer in 2021, and launched an expected second album, Caméo, in the fall of 2022.
She has also toured a lot in France and abroad, as far as China, but her time at the Olympia is in a class of its own.
“The first time was unreal, so I want to do it the second time, to make sure it really happened!” A dream come true, I didn’t know it could have such an effect. »
Suzane’s story was not written in advance: originally from Avignon, in the south of France, Océane Colom was destined instead for a career as a dancer – dance lessons from the age of 5, entrance to Grand Conservatoire de danse d’Avignon at the age of 17. “Classical, contemporary, jazz…I studied movement for a very long time, sickening to it, I think. »
She then becomes Suzane, both to pay homage to her great-grandmother and to emancipate herself from Océane, “the one to whom we told you will be the one who will not express herself, who will stay on the path we had planned for him”.
But in a country where movement between social classes is not fluid, Suzane wants to remember where she comes from. That’s what she says to herself in the song Océane, which opens her new album: not to get lost along the way, not to forget the little middle-class girl she once was.
At 32, Suzane can do everything, as she had dreamed: gestures, speech, music. And dance, which she had rejected, is now an integral part of the artist that she is. “When I’m not dancing, I don’t look good in my sneakers!” That’s what the singer likes about electro music: when she takes it to the body, you have “no choice” to let go.
Behind the dance and the party, there is also an author who takes care of her words and talks about the world around her. “I write a lot in reaction to what I see, it’s how I feel less anxious,” says Suzane, who also talks about sexual diversity in her lyrics.
But when she’s told she’s “too committed, too lesbian, too feminist”… well, she disagrees.
By writing Anouchka, a pretty love song dedicated to her companion, or on female pleasure in Clit is good, the singer is convinced that art that is not watered down can advance society.
“In France I can get married, whereas a few years ago I couldn’t. The laws change because there are songs, films, people who represent all that. »
The pandemic has delayed Suzane’s plan to come and sing here. But never mind: the artist, for whom the stage is the ultimate meeting place with the public, is eager to show up on this first date.
“I believe in karma. If it has to happen, it will happen. At my first shows in France, there were 50, 70 people. And three years later, I was doing the whole Olympia, what! If there is an audience for me here, I hope they find me. And that I’ll be back for my third album even stronger. And that we will do other interviews. »
