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Released on October 10th on streaming platforms, “Le retour des beaux jours”, Vanessa Paradis’ eighth studio album, warms up the autumn.
A return to paradise. Her first album in seven years follows the intimate *Les Sources*, released in 2018, and continues to tell her story through song. Composed between Abbey Road Studios in London and Motorbass in Paris, with Étienne Daho and Jean-Louis Piérot, with Jack and Lily-Rose Depp , between lightness and melancholy… *Le retour des beaux jours* (The Return of Bright Days) is a luminous new collection. The groove takes hold, setting the rhythm for her soul and pop compositions.
Its perfectly sixties feel cradles the album’s universe, from the texture of the dreamlike cover captured by Karim Sadli to its retro font with undulating letters, even guiding the warm palette of the psychedelic music video for her track “Bouquet final” (Final Bouquet), directed by Pascal Teixeira. With her natural ease, Vanessa Paradis brightens with this unique collection of love songs and elegies , written with a beating heart, surrounded by those she cherishes.
Album cover for Vanessa Paradis’s “Le retour des beaux jours” (The Return of Beautiful Days), available now.
© Karim Sadli
Vanessa Paradis, gently hippie
At the pinnacle of soul, Vanessa Paradis makes the music she loves most. The music she shares with Étienne Daho, which gives the album its vibrant character. Born from their close friendship and creative partnership, the melodies are cathartic and align their worlds, two years after “Tirer la nuit sur les étoiles” (Shoot the Night on the Stars), their ethereal duet that lends its name to Daho’s twelfth album. Their new orchestral alchemy thus aptly receives the singer’s philosophical pen, as she writes about love as it comes to her. Her voice, etched in the collective consciousness for decades, which once animated the teen idol and then the refined rock star beloved by the industry—and whose iconic photogenic quality is still celebrated today —now rests closer to her emotions, calmed by time, itself a bearer of wisdom.
Bohemian in Vanessa Paradis’s work, flowers enhance the album’s narrative . There are those offered at the first Rendez-vous , its sentimental crowd where she sings of a heart in turmoil. Then there are those that sting, like Les épines du cœur , her groovy warning of disenchantment, but always with a danceable edge. Or, those that compose Bouquet final , her anthem to the end of love stories, tenderly fatal.
While Vanessa Paradis embraces romantic love in all its facets, she also explores the love one can feel for a city, in this case, Los Angeles. With “Les initiales des Anges” (The Initials of Angels) , she wrote and composed this entire ode to her beloved city, which has inspired her so many times. She then continues in English with the luminous “I Am Alive,” her outro-poem written by her eldest daughter, Lily-Rose Depp. Earlier in the tracklist, Jack Depp is credited with composing the sensual “Éléments” (Elements): the son on gentle piano, the mother on lyrics. A family affair, in the name of the most genuine feeling.
“Le retour des beaux jours” by Vanessa Paradis, available now.