Exclusive Interview: Marianne Dissard

DeadJournalist.com Exclusive Interview: Marianne Dissard
by Chuck Norton
11.04.09

Marianne Dissard - L'Entredeux

Several months ago, I got an e-mail from Marianne Dissard, the Tuscan-based artist, who released her debut album earlier this year. A few months later, I’m happy to bring you this exclusive – and extensive – interview with her.

Dissard, who was born in France and moved to the US at the age of 16, has a resume of artistic endeavors to make most (or at least me) wonder what I’ve been doing with all my time. Among the highlights are projects as diverse as her 2009 French-language album, L’Entredeux, produced by Joey Burns of Calexico and her 1996 documentary of the critically acclaimed and influential 1990′s indie band Giant Sand.

Dissard is on tour in support of her album. For complete dates, or more information on her and her music, visit her Web site www.mariannedissard.com.

DeadJournalist.com proudly brings you this exclusive interview with Marianne Dissard.

You recently released, L’Entredeux, a French-language album that was produced by Calexico. It’s an extremely personal album that was five years in the making. When first writing the songs, did you intend to record them for an album? Did the songs themselves evolve over the years or were the recorded as they were written?

MD: It is very good to be writing to you from the road, as we’re leaving Los Angeles and heading to San Luis Obispo through the torrential Southern California rains.

It all started a while back, as you rightfully mentioned, when Joey Burns sweetly offered to make an album with me. That was in 2004, the eve of the disastrous re-election of George W. Bush to the presidency of the United States. I was busying myself, that summer, being a voter registration activist but, the very day after we lost the election, I exclusively turned my attention toward writing the lyrics I would then give to Joey Burns, per his request.

I never went back to organizing and politics after that day.

Joey and I always had a full album in mind. The guy doesn’t mess around! I had a handful of songs, written with my then-husband Naïm Amor, which I knew I could contribute to the album, songs Naïm had been singing on his own albums or songs we had written together for other singers, such as Françoiz Breut.

After Joey and I had hatched the songs over his kitchen counter-top, we went to Naïm and had him record what I now call the demo album, “Dedicated To Your Walls. May They Keep Blooming”, with the guitar of Joey and my singing, one evening, one take, rough and raw and fragile and shy.

Those basement recordings framed the structures of the songs and were meant to get me to learn the songs so I could start performing them live. We would chop one verse later in the studio, stretch one instrumental part, little things like that, but the songs didn’t change much once they were written and recorded in the demos.  

How did Joey Burns and Calexico become involved and influence the album?

MD: I have known Joey Burns for many, many years. When I came to Tucson to make the Giant Sand documentary “Drunken Bees”, Joey, who had recently joined that band, became a friend.

The following year, when I met Naïm Amor in Paris and started collaborating with him, we knocked on Joey’s door with sketches of songs which Joey kindly recorded on his 8 tracks tape machine. These songs ended up being re-recorded as the first of the Amor Belhom Duo albums, when Naïm’s drummer, Thomas Belhom, moved from France to Tucson.

A couple of years later, Joey, his drummer John Convertino, Naïm, Thomas and myself made a collaborative album titled “ABBC/Tête à Tête”, which was released on the US label Wabana Records. It features songs by all of us. Then, in 1999, Joey asked me to sing with him “The Ballad Of Cable Hogue”, a song on their then-current album which turned out to be their one hit in Europe.

In retrospect, I can say Joey and myself have always been working together, in some form or other, but never as closely as for our album “L’Entredeux”, which he entirely shaped. His deft touch is everywhere on this album. I think he wanted to make a ‘French” album. We ended up making ‘l’entredeux’ to French Chanson and Americana, an album of Americana sung in French.

What lead to the decision to record the album in French, despite its US release?

MD: I had been working as a lyricist for many years before writing song for myself to sing. I wrote in French and in English, even writing a song – in French – for Howe Gelb, who recorded it for his album “All Over The Map”, despite his not speaking French at all. When I started writing the lyrics to “L’Entredeux”, they came out in French, probably because they were personal stories, stories from the heart, in my mother tongue.

I didn’t think of it too much at the time. It’s just that what I had to say was too personal for English. Maybe I was hiding, since no one around me was able to understand what I was saying without translation, including Joey. I was surrounded by books of English poetry when I wrote those lyrics, having found a cocoon in a friend’s house, a poet from Tucson. I was reading Ovide’s “Metamorphosis”, Jorie Graham.

When performing live, do you find you still have a strong emotional reaction to the content of the songs? Or have they become representative of a new chapter of your life?

MD: It seems to me that performing the same songs live, over the course of several years, is a lot like living with a lover. You know where the bond is coming from, the original rush of discovering someone, the ‘honeymoon’ period when you are in love but maybe don’t know why exactly.

Then, as the years progress, and you change, and the relationship evolves, you look for those moments where you’re gonna remember why you fell in love in the first place, and maybe fall in love in different places and discover something about the other person that you had never suspected. But, for that, you have to keep changing and evolving yourself.

You have to put in the work and risk falling out of love.

Is there a song that you now find to be your favorite? Has this changed over the years?

MD: As a result, it’s almost like the songs that mature the best are not the ones that are the easiest ones to love at first. The ones that are emotionally more loaded, such as “Indiana Song” and “Le Lendemain”, not solely in terms of their lyrical content but in terms of their music, were the hardest ones for me to enjoy at first.

Recently, I have really started ‘punking-out’ some of the louder songs. The live shows span, at times, the great stylistic divide between whispered delivery, of the French ‘fragile’ girls tradition and the PJ Harvey-esque or Rita Mitsouko-ish belting out, sometimes even purely loud and punkish. I don’t know. It’s just evolving, I can’t stick to just one style. It depends on the songs. They decide.

Although born in France, you’ve lived in the American Southwest since age 16. When you first moved, how was the adjustment to a new country and new culture?

MD: I went into shock when I first moved to the new suburbs of Phoenix from a small village in the Southwest of France. I was starting to figure out what it meant to be a 16 years old in France and I suddenly had to figure out what dating was.

I don’t think I ever did.

I was an average student in my French high school and I became the best speller in my class in my new school. I was getting to be more and more of a loner in my French school and writing poetry, hiding out during lunch recess. When I moved to America, I was made even more aware of my need for reclusion and my shyness by being the center of attention for a bit, the new French student, the oddity for a bit.

One saving grace, though, in my new surroundings, was that these American teenagers who eventually became my friends were all playing music. Bands, house concerts, record stores, clubs we were sneaking in even though we were underage. Music was alive and well in my new country. Not so much in France. I didn’t know anyone who was in a band in school back there, although, looking further past my generation – and my parents’ generation – to my grandparents’, I remember, from early childhood, that people in the rural communities where I grew up were always singing at gatherings, around a table, banquets…. and I grew up in a small village where they held, every year, a festival of songs and singers from the Pyrénées valleys, all singing in the local dialects.

That must have impressed singing on me, somehow. I found some of that same attachment to singing as a community glue in Tucson, where there’s not a backyard fire pit party without instruments and songs.

When did you first begin crafting lyrics? Was there an event or person who influenced the beginning stages of the craft?

MD: I started writing poetry when I was really young. I think I was about six when I first felt a strong emotion when saying a word, when I became aware of an emotion that was specifically linked to saying, thinking, seeing a word. It was in the back of my grandparents’ farm, by the chicken coop.

I really started writing poetry when I was about 14 or 15. I kept writing until I switched to writing lyrics in 1995, when I met Naïm Amor, a guitar player from Paris. My poetry became lyrics when I gave it to him to put into music. We met and got to know each other that way, and ended up making four albums together and more.

With lyrics, though, I have to say that Howe Gelb is probably a profound influence on my writing, as the one writer whose style enabled me to switch from  my style of poetry to the lyrics I now write. 

Whether it was a filmmaker, poet, performance artist or singer, there are very few aspects of the artistic culture that you haven’t been actively involved in through the years. What made you decide that now was the time focus on being a full-time singer-songwriter?

MD: I don’t know, really. I suppose there’s always something or someone that pushes me through to the next step. I am not necessarily conscious that I need to move on, from one discipline to the other.

When I was a poet, I longed to be actively involved in making things happen, and I started working in films, with people.

When I worked in performance art, I was balancing the lengthy stand-stills of documentary filmmaking production stages, making performances happen in a week as opposed to working on a film for a couple of years.

When I started to write lyrics and gave up on filmmaking, I must have felt the need to be more ‘upfront’.

That’s when I became the “Tucson Rose Girl”, selling roses in downtown bars at night and later, launched the Tucson Suffragettes, a voter registration activist group of foxy vixens.

These days, I have found a balance in my new full-time, spending time writing and time performing. I also know that, as I become more confident singing and performing, I feel free to start incorporating some of my initial practices into what I do onstage.

I rarely think about it in those terms, though. The day to day reality is all about doing what needs to be done.

Having worked with notable artists through the years, is there any one person whose guidance proved to be most helpful?

MD: Calexico’s Joey Burns has been essential in this transition from lyricist to singer, and from singer to touring artist, after Tucson’s one and only Parisian singer, Naïm Amor,  made a lyricist out of the closet poet I was.

Howe Gelb veered me from filmmaking to music when I made the movie “Drunken Bees” on his band, Giant Sand.

Filmmaker Lodge Kerrigan kicked my butt into making my own films instead of working to help others make or distribute their own.

And somewhere in there, choreographer Ami Garmon gave me my first taste of performing and filmmaker Jon Jost showed me how to remain stubbornly independent and flexible.

As a songwriter, is there a process that you find yourself using to craft songs or is each song a different and unique experience?

MD: That’s changed over the years. These days, instead of refining a lyrics until I think it ready, I will write a lot for weeks at a time and then put aside those notebooks until it is time to get together with a composer and write songs collaboratively. I don’t write music at all. I used to want to finalize a lyric before giving it to a musician but I know now to remain flexible and work along with the music, as it evolves. But there can be all sorts of processes, from giving someone words that won’t change to having to completely rewrite a lyrics when the right music is found.

You are already in the process of working on your next album. How is the process going thus far? Will it be a French-language album as well? How will the mood of this album be different from L’Entredeux?

MD: Yes, I have started working on the new album and recorded demos to a handful in songs while in Italy over the summer. I had met an Italian composer, Christian Ravaglioli, who toured with us in the summer, and asked if he could write some songs for me.

We recorded them in his studio near Ravenna, with our friend filmmaker Jon Jost and his wife Marcella with us, filming the shaping of those songs. It was an intense process. Christian doesn’t speak English and I don’t speak Italian. We spent a couple of weeks in the studio and I got immersed in the French language, in a strange cocoon, with my notebooks and books by a French writer, Pierre Guyotat, whose work helped me ground the lyrics into the French language and something else, something more violent, more direct than my previous lyrics for “L’Entredeux”.

I had first thought I’d be doing an English language album but the lyrics came out in French this time again. I have the title of the new album already, “L’Abandon”, and the tattoo that goes with it.

As for “L’Entredeux”, which has its own tattoo design, on my left wrist. “L’Abandon” is, in English, the “letting go, being abandonned, the abandon, forsaking”, as in that song from the movie “High Noon”… “If you forsake me, oh, my darling…”.

Abandon is also, in French, the letting go, the release, opening. It also has a sexual connotation, to be lost in sensuality. Something like that.

The mood of the album? Well, a bit more direct in terms of lyrics, not as ‘poetic’ and cryptic, less ambient. As for the music… well, it will be recorded in Tucson, Arizona with ‘real’ instruments and my friends there, at Jim Waters’ studio, a New York producer who worked with Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, Little Rabbits, Calexico… I think it’ll have guitars, drums.. of course, but also piano, violins, all sorts of great acoustic instruments courtesy of the fine musicians of Tucson with whom I’ve been working and touring for the past four years.

Marianne Dissard

Which do you enjoy more, performing live or writing and recording?

MD: I really love performing. It’s a lot … easier , I guess, than writing and recording, which is like a slow burn, a constant angst for periods of days and weeks. I like it all, though, but I’ve been on tour so much these past years that I can see the changes, on a daily basis when I tour, in my performing. I enjoy working, I enjoy making things happen. It’s a cyclical thing, I suppose.

What is the most important aspect of your live performances?

MD: Going some place I’ve never been before. Last night, I fell off the stage, for the first time ever, in Seattle, in this great dive bar called The Comet. Nothing too dramatic, just a few feet off the stage onto the guitar pedals, but when I got up, laughing out loud, and got back up on stage, I was freer, freer to sing. The distraction, the rush had taken me out of having to worry about the song, the place, hitting the right notes, the right mood.

I should be falling off the stage every time, or something akin to that. But that’s all work and technicalities.

The main goal of all of this plotting and scheming is to give a fine performance, to give to the people there something they’ve not heard before.

Being in the midst of being touring in support of your album, what have you found to be the most enjoyable part of being on the road? Has there been tour stop where you were surprised at the turn out or fan base support?

MD: Being on the road is a constraint within a freedom, or the reverse. All is set, there is a routine to waking up, driving, eating, playing but, along the way, there are people to meet, old friends and new ones, new venues and towns and also truck stops we’ve visited before, food we look forward to, such as poutine in Montreal at 3am when it’s minus 30 degrees outside.

As for surprising audiences, I’d say smaller towns like San Luis Obispo in California have turned out to be very supportive, but when you can have a great show in larger cities, even with a handful of people, it is very exciting.

In places like NYC or Paris, the people who come to the shows are mostly artists, other musicians, writers…. It’s a different dialog than smaller towns. And then, in Europe, it all changes depending on the country.

In Germany, the audience will expect something a bit more… French than the French would. Everyone is looking for the exoticism in the performance, something not heard before, a combination of the French and the American in the sound, in the band, in myself.

What is the most bizarre event that has occurred to you while on tour?

MD: Hmm…. I’d say the strangest show I’ve ever done was the one I set up a year ago in my grandparents’ village, in the south of France, near Pau and the Pyrénées. We played a small cafe, with the microphone used there for karaoke nights. The people who came to the show were people I hadn’t seen, for some, for 25 years. Childhood friends who were their own children’s age when I last saw them, men and mostly women in their 80′s who had seen me crawl on all fours, family I had lost touch with but remembered from the time before my move to America.

It was strange, intimidating… Once you’ve played a show like that, you can play any show, big or small, and not be intimidated anymore. This was the most “home show” of all home shows!

What is the challenging part of your live now that you are a touring artist? Does it make it difficult for you to separate your personal life from your professional one?

MD: Personal life? Is that different from professional life? I finished the album and started touring after breaking up with my husband/boyfriend of 13 years. I suppose I rebuilt my life around its professional aspects. That’s just how it is. I suppose I don’t see myself having a kid, a family and settling down anytime soon, or, for that matter, ever.

Is there an artist that you’ve encountered recently that you’ve been recommending to your friends?

Sergio Mendoza  Y La Orkesta. Sergio and his big band (between 11 and 17 people) are based in Tucson, Arizona. Check them out online. They’ve opened for Calexico, three of its members are Calexico members and we will hopefully tour together in the summer 2010, with Sergio’s Orkesta backing me up, and Sergio as my musical director, just like in the ol’ days.

What were you listening to in 1999?

MD: Giant Sand, Dominique A., Katerine, Johnny Cash. Now I listen to mariachi music, Chavela Vargas and Will Oldham.

Which do you prefer: MP3, CD, Tape or Vinyl?

MD: I listen to CDs on the road, mp3s at home, and vinyls when I have parties.

What Web site (s) do you read regularly?

MD: Huffington Post, Le Monde.

One Drink; One Movie; One Album:

MD: Yerba mate, Walker, I See A Darkness