Name: Keren Ann
Occupation: Singer, songwriter
Nationality: French
Current release: Keren Ann's new album Paris Amour is out via Bring Back.
Recommendations for Paris, France: Musée Gustave Moreau.
Topic I am passionate about but rarely get to talk about: I love spending time in old book shops and finding notes or press cuts that people left in books.
Also, psychoanalyses, homeostasis, microbiome, hormones and the relation between all of the above.

If you enjoyed this Keren Ann interview and would like to stay up to date with her music, visit her official homepage. She is also on Instagram, and Facebook. 



Do you think that some of your earliest musical experiences planted a seed for your interest in writing lyrics or poetry? How and when did you start writing?

Storytelling in the form of a song has always been something I wished to explore.

I love the architecture of songs. Verses and choruses with rhyme & rhythm in a harmonic progression where some parts that are destined for repetition.

All of these elements together for a very specific shape, and it has always appealed to me. I love reading poetry and receiving it as a whole in an inaudible manner - no need to to hear it or have music composed to it since it stands on it’s own.

Entering new worlds and escapism through music and literature have always exerted a very strong pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to writing?

Growing up I spoke four different languages but not even one of them fluently. I constantly misspoke and made errors in one language or another because I was often unconsciously translating as I was speaking.

Writing on the other hand, allowed me to take the time and correct myself, check grammar, syntax and choice of vocabulary. It also gave me the possibility to choose to use certain translations that came to me automatically and permitted a writing identity.

Till today I adore letting syntax and rhythm dictate a line or two before I even know what the song or the poem I’m writing is about.

What were some of the artists and albums which inspired you early on purely on the strength of their lyrics? What moves you in the lyrics of other artists?

Obviously writers who were the narrators made me feel like a privileged listener and to this day Dylan, Cohen, Mitchell, Springsteen as well as lyrics of many classics performed by great jazz voices (Billie Holiday, Chet Baker) move me.

Have there been song lyrics which actually made you change (aspects of) your life? If so, what do you think, leant them that power?

I have learned a lot about love from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen, a lot about heartbreak from Billie Holiday songs (and the great writers she had worked with), a lot about myself through David Byrne / Talking Heads.

I have always considered many forms of music to be a form of poetry as well. Where do you personally see similarities? What can music express which may be out of reach for poetry?

I can sometimes feel Prokofiev in Charles Bukovsky, or Schumann in Robert Desnos, maybe even Dvorak in Guillaume Apollinaire … I once felt Chostakovitch in Gherasim Luca, but I don’t know if I can ever feel Desnos inside Schumann or Bukovsky inside Prokofiev.

Poetry can be a whole and stand without any other form, but some music compositions can be so dense that not only they stand on their own, they cannot even contain any other form.

The relationship between words and music has always intrigued me. How do you see it? In how far can music take you to places with your writing you would possibly not have visited without it?

There is a real co-dependence between lyrics and music when it comes to songs. A certain word sung with a certain note on a certain chord, will not have the same effect if you changed the note, chord or the harmony.

The entire frequency can change when you transform one element. Just like in any other form of expression.

What are areas/themes/topics that you keep returning to in your lyrics?

Love, longing, being a mother and/or being a lover while being a writer / composer, truth, authenticity, roots, analysis of behavior and most of all- story telling without judgement.

Do you tend to start writing with what will be the first line of the finished lyrics? The chorus? At a random point? What are the words that set the process in motion?

It can be a word, a line, a melodic progression, a chord, an image … anything that’ll sit me at the piano or on my kitchen table with a guitar and a notebook and will become important enough to dig deeper.

I'd love to know how you think the meaning or effect of an individual song is enhanced, clarified or possibly contradicted by the EPs, or albums it is part of. Does the song, for example, need to be consistent with the larger whole?

For me a song is always a part of a series but has the responsibility to exist on its own.

An album contains a number of songs that are connected through soundscape and production. They tell a story that, in my case, is usually a chapter, a real consistent lived chapter, lived both emotionally and analytically.

But each song needs to have it’s very own identity, and stand straight regardless of the fellow songs that are a part of the same collection/ series.

When you're writing song lyrics, do you sense or see a connection between your voice and the text? Does it need to feel and sound “good” or “right” to sing certain words? What's your perspective in this regard of singing someone else's songs versus your own?

I believe this has evolved with the years.

Today I tend to choose tessitures that feel very natural to the story being told. When I was younger I sometimes wrote songs that required older age to be sung (I wrote an album for Henri Salvador when I was 23 and he was 83) and when I performed these songs I had to find a legitimate key that felt right.

The songs were always truthful and the emotion was always authentic and experienced but the language was sometimes related to a place I hadn’t reached yet and I needed to find the balance through the key I was recording in.

Today I don’t question the key, it comes naturally.

I would love to know a little about the feedback you've received from listeners or critics about what they thought some of your songs are about – have there been “misunderstandings” or did you perhaps even gain new “insights?”

Usually people get what the song is about, but sometimes certain listeners have their own reading and feel it’s about something else, maybe something that they have experienced that is not necessarily what I was telling.

That is absolutely fine.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you feel as though writing song lyrics or poetry is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

There is nothing I express in music or writing that I figured how to express in mundane tasks, otherwise I wouldn’t have been making music nor writing.

I make music and write because there is no other way for me to fill that part.