Today, the French artist Silly Boy Blue (Ana Benabdelkarim) releases her album Breakup Songs, the perfect name for her debut, which is all about the rollercoaster of love, from crushes to crashes.
Silly Boy Blue is a young singer, songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and producer based in Paris, newly signed to Columbia France. She used to be a music journalist and started her artistic journey as part of the French band Pégase. Borrowing her name from a David Bowie song, Silly Boy Blue shares with him a taste for risk and a deep-rooted desire to push norms and codes. Ana’s universe is beautifully split between glam goth, emo and bedroom pop, she is as bright as the sun and as dark as the night. Silly Boy Blue sings teen pop anthems and breakup songs, and has a passion for 90’s music, movies & style.
“Teenager is the last song I wrote before starting the studio session. It is a sort of overview of what I am, of all the things I didn’t want to forget to mention in the album: to be a woman told to shut up, to not always fit in the box, to talk about sexuality too. I called it Teenager because it is the song I would have liked to write in my teenage years, and the lyrics I would have liked to hear. We shot the music video in the high school I used to go to, precisely where I spent those years.” – Silly Boy Blue
With sparkling eyes, Ana talks passionately about the musicians whose pictures are still pinned on her bedroom wall: Siouxsie & The Banshees, Marilyn Manson, The Cure, Fever Ray, Lady Gaga, Prince, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Christine and the Queens, Frank Ocean, Joan Jett… She calls them untouchables, unreal. With her trademark modesty, she also shows her university thesis, called “The Androgynous bodies in music, from David Bowie to Mykki Blanco”… Digging into her memories, she talks about herself as a rebellious goth college girl, wearing proudly laddered tights. “I was more Outsider than Popular”, she recalls.
This rich and passionate build up in music helped her to develop a solid and personal universe right from her first EP, the luxurious But You Will. The sound was definitely hers, a prowess far too rare in French pop, which very often has the bravery outshadowed by caution and the lack of ambition. The EP took its name from the film Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. Sung in English, dreamy and wide, it revealed an intimate song writing, carnal, without prudishness, tortured but still strong. Like her all-time heroes Elliott Smith and Lana Del Rey, Silly Boy Blue cured her blues with words. Her songs mix sensual acoustic sounds and devilish electronics, forming a fascinating exercise of layers upon layers. Her music could be called “humble maximalism”, as opposed to “whinging minimalism”, as minimalism couldn’t contain all her desires of escapism, of post-pop in any case.
If she comes across as shy in the social circus, in day-to-day life, Ana certainly is not when it comes down to her music “Using the Silly Boy Blue persona allows me to be stronger, freer, braver than in real life. I desperately needed an avatar to be more honest and finally tell people how I feel. Even if I need songs to achieve this… Between Ana & Silly Boy Blue, I sometimes wonder who is the real me.” Ana describes herself as a romantic, incapable of expressing her feelings. Since the dark torment of her teenage years, she has learned how to live with crushes, love affairs reduced to silence by the capitulation of words, the impotency of failed courage. “In my head, I go through love affairs without the other person even being aware of it. But if I hadn’t had these things to write about in my teenage days, I don’t know how I would have gone through life. It really helped me understand myself, to find myself less weird.”
The first Silly Boy Blue album is comprised of 12 songs. Some will only need a guitar and the voice. Some others will require the wizardry and opulence of rhythm and arrangements. The recording started in Paris with Apollo Noir, who was joined in Normandy by Sam Tiba, from Club Cheval, also in charge of production duties. But Ana also operated on the mixing desk and has produced 3 songs on her own. “It was a feminist statement, she says. I really wanted to play every piece of piano and guitar, write the arrangements and produce some tracks. I am quite geeky but also impatient, which is a bad combination. It reinforces my fears of being useless, of being revealed as an imposter. Nevertheless, even though I have LOTS to say about being a female musician, I have even more things to discuss as a musician.”
This is what is striking in her songs: their meticulousness, their musicality. It describes perfectly well the rollercoaster of love, from crushes to crashes. No one will be surprised to hear that there is a special guest on most of these songs: melancholy. “I have always been very, very melancholic, says Ana. In my life and in my head, I collect memories, dates, feelings. They are all linked to songs.”
When asked if music still saves lives. She answers without a blink. “Without music, my life would have been totally different. It helped me to hate myself a bit less. My biggest dream would be that my album falls into the hands of an equally fucked up girl, who doesn’t know who she is, if she prefers boys or girls. And that this girl feels OK while listening to me. I just want to pay forward what Bowie and others did for me.”
Silly Boy Blue videos:
“Hi, It’s Me Again”
“Goodbye”
“The Riddle”
“The Fight” (Orchestral Version)
Breakup Songstracklist – out June 18th via Columbia France:
01. Hi, It’s Me Again
02. Teenager
03. The Riddle
04. Be the Clown
05. Creepy Girl
06. 200 Lovesongs
07. Goodbye
08. Lantern
09. Oh Please
10. 22
11. Cecilia Part II
12. The Fight (Orchestral Version)
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