After a five-year hiatus and almost stopping music, Fanny Bloom is back with Holistique, a fourth solo album focused on others, as serious as it is light, which testifies to the path taken by the singer-songwriter.
When she looks at the vinyl placed on the table of the Montreal café where we meet her, Fanny Bloom is proud and happy… but also slightly surprised.
“I kind of can’t believe it. Let’s say if I woke up after five years, not knowing everything that happened, looking back I would say to myself: “My God, I came back.” »
In 2019, after 10 intense years where she alternated album releases in two-year cycles – first with La Patère rose, then solo – and shows, Fanny Bloom hit a wall. It was a year after the release of Liqueur, and she stopped her tour without knowing if she would ever come back.
“I had stretched the rubber band and it made me really anxious,” she recalls. And then everything happened: a diagnosis that complicated things – “a genetic thing, but everything is fine” –, a baby, a pandemic.
“It shook me to my roots,” says Fanny Bloom, who motherhood confronted a fear she had never known. “I was afraid of dying. I imagined myself not existing in this world where my child existed and it drove me crazy. »
A “great inner struggle” for the young mother, who realized that “life goes very quickly and that we are not eternal”. Add to that the loss of bearings linked to the pandemic, and you have someone who needed time to catch their breath and settle down.
The taste for music returned, slowly, a year and a half ago. “I tried to get back into the swing of things a little bit. To sit down at the piano to see where I was. Then I wrote songs. Then I went to the studio. Then I produced my album. »
This is because Fanny Bloom has decided to take control. After three albums produced by Grosse Boîte (now Bravo Musique), she is now under license with Audiogram, meaning she is her own producer. “It was a big playground! There was no one to say: “We can’t put a budget here or there,” because I was the one who decided. ” Result ? An album completely to his taste. “Otherwise it would be completely my fault! »
This goes well with the album title, Holistic, which means “considering an object as a whole, as a whole.” “It’s a word that reassured me during this postpartum, post-pandemic period. I needed to anchor myself in something. To do: OK, we’re connected. »
This is what led to this multifaceted album, where string arrangements rub shoulders with a collaboration with rapper Greg Beaudin, where a disco anthem rubs shoulders with a moving song for his son, which speaks of the beautiful and the less beautiful and which is largely written in the tu.
The album of a birth and a rebirth, then? She thinks a little. ” I think so. There is clearly before this album, and this one and the rest. I don’t know what it will be, but it will definitely never be the same again. I don’t think I’m quite the same person either. I’m better, that said! »
Producer Fanny Bloom got along well with designer Fanny Bloom. “The paths were made automatically,” she says. Managing budgets, ensuring that we respect deadlines… I have a business side that is there, well passed down from my mother. I could be a good producer for others. »
She therefore co-produced with Valaire Thomas Hébert, a lifelong accomplice in love and work, a series of well-polished songs. “Little brushed stones,” says Fanny Bloom, who likes working in the studio, looking for new sounds, refining, with the aim of building rich electropop jewels.
The creator surrounded herself with a host of collaborators, including Vincent Legault on string arrangements, and Erika Angel on vocal arrangements, who brought her “new colors”.
Fanny Bloom does not regret her effervescent years. “That’s what I wanted. I had time, I had fun. But at one point, I had squeezed out all the juice I had. »
Now that she has “put the sponge back in the water”, she is happy to have found a new balance to enjoy her son and life. Returning actively to creation, Fanny Bloom also began making music for film this year. She works (hard) on the series Sorcières which is broadcast on TVA, and appreciates this “door that opens” and which she did not expect.
She hopes to give shows, but is especially happy that the album she wanted to make exists. “I would like people to receive it lightly. We need to take care of ourselves! That’s a bit like dialogue with others. I hope that people who listen to it will feel challenged. »
What does she want to say to him, to the other? ” I understand you. It’s stupid, but that’s it. It seems that I love humans more than I loved them before. I hope it will be felt. »
