As the daughter of Jane Birkin and French director Jacques Doillon, Lou was born cool. But one of the many awesome things about the 33-year-old multi-hyphenate is that she’s utterly genuine: her music bleeds heart on the sleeve emotion. When we met up with her a couple years back she was utterly unguarded, just like in her songs. We talked about everything from cheating boys, growing up in the spotlight, being tagged an “It Girl” and how music, not film, not modeling, is really the only medium which works for her. Which is a bonus for us.
Her first album Places won multiple awards in France and “Where to Start”—premiering below—is the first taster from her sophomore LP “Lay Low” (out in the US on Friday). With its delicate 60s-angled piano chords, “Where to Start” is a sparse pop song, which in the chorus fills listeners ears with warm strings and Doillon’s voice, sounding slightly torn and beautifully dejected
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“‘Where To Start’ is actually the last song I wrote for the album,” says Doillon. “It was in December, a couple of days before jumping in a plane to meet [producer] Taylor Kirk on December 27th. ‘Where to Start’ came from this place of hurt. It’s about empathy, or lack of! And the question was and still is: Is there any use in explaining hurt to people who don’t care… still don’t know.
“I wrote in a triple time beat, with a finger picking loopy vibe to it on my acoustic Guild guitar. Taylor thought it had something classic, and he had the idea to brake it in a kind of doo-wop style.
It all went pretty fast, his great musicians (from Timber Timbre) and I played it live a couple of times, and the sound was there. It was pretty much done by the first round of sessions. It turned out to be the first song we had finished. We did three sessions of five days for Lay Low, and I did additional recordings in London and Paris.
“I believe in recording live all together, with vintage instruments, tools and a vintage process. One didn’t have the time and money to rent recording studios for months back then, and actually we’re back to these times now… The emergency, love, innocence and mistakes are on the tapes, and I like that.
“Here are some pictures of the drawings I was doing around the time we did the video with the lightest team ever: my man and I. I had taken a velvet costume from the French tailoring brand Pallas. We recorded the images with my iphone, while the song was playing on his. The location was beautiful, by a lake in the south of France. I wanted something as bare as the song, stripped down and for the process of the video to match the process of recording.”
Images after the song…
Check out more of Doillon’s illutstrations here.
