Not just another pretty face

When people think of models making records they think of Naomi Campbell or Caprice, but please don’t leave the room. Let’s not forget that Nico was a model before she made her debut album with the Velvet Underground. Feel better now?

Such mixed reflection has been prompted by Turin-born and Paris-raised Carla Bruni who recently abandoned the fashion catwalk for a career as a performer-songwriter. Whatever cynicism commentators indulged in over Bruni’s move has been spectacularly answered by both the quality and the surprising commercial success of her French language debut album Quelqu’un M’a Dit (Somebody Told Me in English). Sales hover around the million mark in France and critical acclaim has even emanated from such cool circles as the French rock mag Les Inrockuptibles..
Carla Bruni doesn’t betray any nostalgia for the world of Naomi and Caprice.
“Modelling has to do with very young years,” she says. “I was finished with modelling before I started writing music, just using my voice and guitar. Modelling is a very tiring job, and it’s not very satisfying. It’s not very creative. The creative work is done by the photographer, the designer, the make-up artist. Even the assistant is more creative than the model! The model is just like the cherry on the cake and you’re not involved in making the cake at all, and the travelling is so crazy, especially from the point of view of having a relationship or friends or an apartment in one place. There was no routine, just travel. That’s why I have no regrets.”
Her impressive range of musical influences also obliterates any lingering notion of her as a mere clothes horse, ranging from Mozart, Satie, Stravinsky and Brahms to The Clash, Dylan, Beatles, Billy Holiday, Ricky Lee Jones, Velvet Underground, Emmylou Harris, Jacques Brel, Björk, U2, Dolly Parton et al. Everything, she says, bar disco music.
Her lyrics, even in translation, offer evidence of a tendency to overturn gender stereotypes. For example, she has penned a witty paean to Raphael, the mainman in her life. “He may look like an angel but he’s a devil of a lover/When he rolls those hips and gives me a velvet look I’ll be up all night”, she quotes before adding, “There are lots of songs named after women but few named after men. I like to talk about desire in a very masculine way. It’s a bit masculine to take your husband’s name and make it a song. I suppose it’s not a very classic feminine thing to do, so all the more reason to do it.”
Singing exclusively in French may be a turn-off for the intellectually lazy, but Bruni sees the language as no barrier.
“My approach to music is very simple, and people can understand the emotions of my songs through the sound of my voice, the tone I use. The song ‘Tout Le Monde’ on Quelqu’un M’a Dit is about treating people as individuals. I sing about loneliness and indifference and caring about people, and I believe people get that through how you sing even if they don’t get the exact words.”
As to her method of writing songs, Bruni compares it to a kiss.
“Sometimes the words come first or maybe the melody, but sometimes they come together like a kiss and sometimes it’s hard to know who is kissing who.”
Bruni is currently writing an album in English, although she also writes in Italian. Meantime, Quelquíun Mía Dit stands as collection of songs that spectacularly overturns suspicions of a pretty face selling music instead of clothes.

Quelquíun Mía Dit by Carla Bruni is out now on V2