On October 18th, Nicolas Michaux will release his third album, titled Vitalisme. This album consists of twelve recordings made over the years on the Danish island of Samsø and at the Free House, the studio of Capitane Records in Brussels.
Much like in his previous album Amour Colère, Michaux navigates between polarities in Vitalisme : dawn and dusk, birth and destruction, hope and cold lucidity, past and future. However, this time it is less about exploring the different poles of human experience and more about bringing them together at a precise point where life unfolds. Armed with impeccable writing in both French and English, Michaux traverses the familiar lands of inspired songwriters, addressing grand themes of timeless poetry as well as the empirical realities of the contemporary world : love, illness, war, wisdom, resurrection ; but also climate change and class war.

 

The album’s title, Vitalisme, is both solar and mysterious, chosen by Michaux in homage to Gilles Deleuze who wrote in Pourparlers: “In the act of writing, there is an attempt to make life something more than personal, to free life from what imprisons it. […] There is a deep connection between signs, the event, life, and vitalism. It is the power of non-organic life, the one that can exist in a line of drawing, writing, or music. It is the organisms that die, not life. There is no work that does not indicate an exit to life, that does not trace a path between the cobblestones. Everything I have written was vitalist, at least I hope so…”

 

In essence, Michaux offers a profession of faith here, a commitment that his work has to do with life. And evidently, this is a commitment held true as the album emanates a truth, a monastic-like simplicity, and a beauty that can almost be described as rural.
Claiming to be an artisan, Michaux is also a hyperactive creator, producing music for other artists (Turner Cody, Irma Thomas, Ben Chace, Lisa-Li Lund…), mixing (Regina Spektor, Under The Reefs Orchestra, Binki Shapiro…), directing music videos, and even dabbling in photography in his spare time. Since 2020, he has been one of the driving forces behind Capitane Records, one of the most interesting emerging indie labels, a cooperative and self- managed enterprise by the artists themselves.

 

“This is my form of activism I guess,” says Michaux. “I have decided for now to fight in my own field, music, by trying to create a sort of cultural ZAD (“zone to defend” in French), a self- defense unit allowing music to be produced and disseminated autonomously from ‘market laws’ and trends. We are part of a broader generational movement that only wants to work according to its ethics and its own quality standards. We see this in all areas of society; people no longer believe in capitalist rhetoric, they no longer want to produce junk for capital. I discovered the world of social economy and found it absolutely fascinating; it is one of the places where the world of tomorrow is being built daily. Little by little, we are trying to create bridges with other initiatives in the social economy.”

 

Recorded partly on the island of Samsø and partly at the Free House, Capitane Records’ studio in Brussels, Vitalisme, like Michaux’s previous albums, blends indie rock and French chanson, constantly rooted in a soundscape reminiscent of the warmth and freedom of 70s records. In an approach akin to Brazilian tropicalists, Michaux has always chosen the honesty of an artistic proposition that fuses his inherited culture and knowledge of French chanson with various “external” sources : early rock , Ghanaian highlife, new wave, to name a few.

 

Produced by Michaux himself, the album features the Belgian singer playing most of the instruments, including guitars, wurlitzer, and bass, which form the backbone of the album. However, the album also showcases the talent of Michaux’s team: Ted Clark on bass on several tracks, Clément Nourry and Yannick Dupont on Voir Le Jour, Morgan Vigilante and Léo Léonard sharing the drummer’s seat, and the contribution of the virtuoso Congolese musician Rodriguez Vangama, a long-time collaborator of Michaux. The album was mixed by Michaux and masterfully mastered by his usual partner Remy Lebbos at Rare Sound Studio.

 

The album opens with Chaleur Humaine a single released in the summer of 2023, a propitiatory song and invitation to life and friendship until the end of the world. Chaleur Humaine irresistibly transports us to the lights of hope and struggle.

 

J’attends dans la brume du soir L’apocalypse
Chaque fois je crois la voir
Et puis elle s’éclipse

Oh mon frère dis-moi quand tu viens Oh mon frère dis-moi quand tu viens

Retour à la terre
Retour en arrière
Que toute cette chaleur humaine Que toute cette chaleur humaine

(I wait in the evening mist The apocalypse
Every time I think I see it And then it vanishes

Oh my brother tell me when you come

Back to the land
Back to the past
May all this human warmth Bear fruit)

 

“The song came to me like a gift from the sky. One day on vacation while playing the ukulele. Everything came to me at once, from start to finish in a few minutes. It was as if all the anxiety about the future slowly accumulated in me had suddenly been released and transformed into something joyful. As if the part of me that still wants to believe had triumphed over fear and despair. The production process, however, took time; I had to try several versions before finding the right formula. But finally, after several very different demos, I ended up recording the final version in an hour or two. It’s a free song, it does only what it pleases.”

 

The second song on the album, Peace of Mind #2 exposes a more personal side of Michaux’s writing. Mixing French verses with an English chorus, the Belgian singer evokes his childhood, partly spent in hospitals, his youth in the streets of Paris, and his present in Denmark. It is a kind of poetic biography written in alexandrines interspersed with choruses in English evoking the nostalgia of a lost love. The disarming honesty and frankness of the text, combined with an original and catchy musical proposition, already make this song a classic in Michaux’s repertoire and undoubtedly one of his most beautiful songs to date.

 

“This is a song I started working on as part of a socio-cultural project led by BOZAR in Brussels. A few months ago, I put it back on the table and decided to keep the chorus from my first version but change the verses and structure of the song. The first verse is based on a poem I wrote a few years ago titled IRM (MRI in French) It was about my childhood and teeneage years, I just had to continue the story for the following verses. This song is undoubtedly an evolution in my journey as a songwriter. I recorded my parts in my cabin on Samsø. Léo Garnier then laid down a cool drum part and Rodriguez Vangama added percussions and guitar.”

 

The album continues with the third track, Watching The Cars, a new wave-influenced song with an irresistible riff that plunges us into a Cassavetes-like atmosphere. In it, a man, locked in a motel, is forced, like a punished child in primary school, to write the same sentence over and over while the owner watches the war on television. The phrase he must copy : “Will they kill another kid ?” inevitably brings to mind the events of October 7 and the ongoing massacre in Gaza. With a groove reminiscent of Talking Heads or Ian Dury, this waking nightmare has the makings of a hit, wonderfully capturing the dystopian ambiance of our current times and ready to wake the dead.

 

The fourth track, Alma, is a love song dedicated to Michaux’s cat named like that. It is a lighter song than the previous ones, celebrating the power of love to help us through life’s difficulties. The public may not listen when we sing, the ground may sometimes seem to slip from under our feet, the societal change we impatiently await may take centuries to come, but love is there to help us through it all. This sunny track, in line with Chaleur Humaine, will undoubtedly become an important staple in Michaux’s live sets.

 

She’s an Easy Rider is a cover of the American songwriter Tucker Zimmerman, who has been living in Belgium since the 1960s.
”I discovered Tucker Zimmerman and his work about fifteen years ago. A musician friend from Liège told me about him and the incredible story of this San Francisco songwriter living in the Liège region for over 40 years, whose magnificent work has largely gone unnoticed. Around 2010, I listened a lot to his first two albums, Ten Songs and Songpoet. Then I moved on and didn’t listen to Tucker Zimmerman for years. In May 2022, my second daughter was born. For some reason, during the days before and after her birth in Samsø, as spring was in full bloom and everything exuded life, this particular song that I had almost forgotten kept coming back to me, constantly, for several days. It felt like a calling; I had a few days off from the world and decided to seize the opportunity. In a few hours, I found a rhythm and tone that suited me and quickly recorded the version of the song you hear today. Ted Clark and Morgan Vigilante added bass and drums a few weeks later at the Free House, our studio in Brussels. I completed the keyboard and guitar arrangements last summer with Kevin Antoine and François Dubois while we were working on the idea for the video.”

 

It’s worth noticing, Michaux’s version is very different from Tucker Zimmerman’s original. From its folk starting point, the song is transformed here into a great and beautiful indie ballad that can recall the wooded ambiance of the first solo albums of the former Beatles and the elegant coolness of Mac DeMarco.

 

“I see this single as a tribute to the women in my life and women in general. I am convinced of the profound necessity for them to live freely now, as they have lived in a straitjacket for so long and their bodies have been controlled by the opposite sex. “Father don’t deny your daughter her own highway” is a phrase that resonates deeply with me; it’s almost like a mantra that I try to keep as a guiding principle in my role as a father.”

 

The track is accompanied by a video directed by Kevin Antoine, who previously directed Amusement Park for Michaux. It is a cinematic work in its own right, resembling more a short film than a strict music video. Unusually, Michaux does not appear on screen. The story is set at the beginning of the last century in a hospice, and the film is a closed-door interaction between a patient, a nurse, and a doctor. The emotionally charged narrative scenes are interspersed with shots of the main heroine riding a horse on a deserted beach. The freedom of a 60s biker evoked by the song is translated here to the early 20th century, with the horse replacing the Harley Davidson. This spatial-temporal rift and the contrast created between the song and the images make this clip a pure marvel in the vein of the videos that accompanied the singer’s previous releases.

 

“After this kind of trilogy of music videos that I released in recent years – Nos Retrouvailles, Amusement Park, Chaleur Humaine – I wanted something different that revolves less around my character. My ex-partner Naja Laursen suggested the idea of the horse replacing the motorcycle. Then, following discussions with François Dubois, the director of photography, the idea started to take shape, and the hospice story inspired by his mother’s history began to form. Once I felt the project was on track, I let Kevin and François take the lead freely and only followed the filming process from afar. Remarkably, although the song was not written by me and I followed this shoot from a distance, I feel this might be my most personal and intimate proposition to date. When I saw the edit for the first time, I cried for 10 minutes. I don’t quite know why. It’s complicated to explain, but indirectly and subtly, this clip tells a part of me and my life so far.”

 

Réparations closes the first side of the album. This atmospheric ballad chronicles the life of a couple slowly falling apart, beginning with these lines:

 

“Ils ne pourront jamais réparer le mal qu’ils nous ont fait / Non jamais on ne nous rendra le bien qu’on nous a pris / Qui n’avait pas de prix”

(They will never be able to repair the harm they did to us / No, never will we get back the good that was taken from us / Which was priceless”)

Few authors can sum up an entire generation’s feelings in a few lines, and Michaux is one of them. His art lies in his talent for constantly weaving connections between History and stories, between the world’s great movements and people’s personal destinies. Réparations is a perfect illustration of this.

 

A Long Time which opens side B, is a somewhat ironic meditation on the theme of patience, taking the form of an extremely charming track with rhythm ‘n blues and soul accents, situated somewhere between Dr. John and Beck.

 

“You can pray in the morning /
And read through the night
/ You gotta tell yourself It’s gonna be alright It’s taking a long time
Just taking a long time

Well the sun will shine
/ And the moon will dance / And you might even be given A second chance
But it takes a long time
It takes such a long time”

 

 

Here, one can feel the truth of experience in the text and the voice of someone whose path has always been strewn with obstacles and who has forged a way through work and determination. A member of the Soldiers of Love, recently returned from New Orleans where he produced a Gospel album for the great Irma Thomas, Michaux here celebrates his love of American music and his mastery of rhythm ‘n’ blues codes. The result is one of the album’s most mesmerizing tracks.

 

Voir le Jour, which follows A Long Time, is a luminous track that talks about rebirth and nightclubs. With his characteristic sound and subtle self-mockery, the belgian singer creates a universe that is both comforting and delirious, delivering a deceptively naive song in the style he is known for since his first album. Indeed, with Michaux, nothing is ever written or sung lightly. Behind its rock-steady appearance lies a true marvel of a song, a sort of philosophical tale questioning self-birth :

 

How old must one be to see the light of day?”
How many paths to walk, cities to cross, loves to live, how many joys, sorrows, deaths, and resurrections to truly become oneself and see the light?

 

“Tu t’en vas nue là-bas vers l’enfer / Et je me donne corps et âme / Pour que l’on soit ensemble / Ensemble toute la vie

(“You go naked there towards hell / And I give myself body and soul / So that we can be together / together for life”)

 

“This song started as a kind of joke by adapting a chord progression I discovered in an old Western Swing sheet music book. But quite quickly, I realized there was something to it. And I played with this kind of dream that still haunts some of us : the myth of eternal love and ‘happily ever after.’ All these things you have to let go of in the context of a separation.”

 

A Tiger Has Escaped From The Zoo is a unique track, a fantastic tale that is both dreamlike and political, a story of liberation and revenge, revolution and solitude, love and anger. In a city, a tiger escapes from the zoo, and society collapses. The plebeians descend the flanks of Vesuvius, the guillotine works at full capacity, and no one cares about a little girl who lost her bike in the city’s labyrinth. A poetic song about deposition and emancipation, A Tiger Has Escaped From The Zoo is also, in terms of production, an adventurous and original sonic proposition. Masterfully arranged by Michaux himself, Julien Rauïs and Thomas Jean Henri from Cabane, the recording is an entire universe, a labyrinth of analog keyboards and 70s synthesizers subtly laid over powerful and mechanical drums. The result is a guaranteed trip into the ethereal world of dreams.

 

Le Léthé is the second cover on the album. It is a cover of Léo Ferré’s song based on a poem by Charles Baudelaire. In 1957, Ferré released a legendary album: “Léo Ferré chante Les Fleurs du mal” in which he offered a collection of musical adaptations of some poems from Baudelaire’s “Les Fleurs du Mal” : L’invitation au Voyage, Les Hiboux, etc. Le Léthé is part of this collection to which Michaux has been particularly attached for years.

 

“One day in Paris, about ten years ago, I was in a record store on Rue des Ecoles with my ex-partner, and she bought this record. Back at the apartment, from the first listen, I loved everything about this album : the voice, the lyrics, the arrangements, the cover… On the back of the album, there was a dedication we hadn’t initially noticed: ‘For you, who gave me back the taste for life, Didier.’ I thank Didier for once giving this album to his lover, and I thank the latter for selling it. It allowed me to discover this beauty and years later to record this humble tribute.”

 

Initially recorded for a home video capture, the recording featured here presents Michaux solo on Wurlitzer piano. The video of the recording is still available on YouTube.

 

Next comes the almost instrumental Vitalisme, the album’s title track, based on a jam session recording between Morgan Vigilante and Michaux himself. Morgan laid down a drum track at the end of a session, over which Michaux improvised this bass and these two guitars to create a beautiful instrumental piece evoking the harmonies and rhythms of Ghanaian music.

 

“For years, I’ve been obsessed with a 70s High-Life compilation released on the amazing label Soundway. It greatly contributed to my learning and vision of music. I think that pieces like Vitalisme can emerge quite easily in me precisely because of this passion for Ghanaian and African music. I barely remembered recording this jam. Recently, I came across it again and really liked the arrangement of the different elements and the guitar solo. So, I decided it was a good complement to the album and included it.”

 

With both great simplicity and undeniable nobility, Au Revoir Ma Chérie beautifully closes the album. This Neil Young-like ballad is reminiscent of Une Seconde Chance from Amour Colère. It immerses us in an atmosphere that blends serenity and abandonment. In an upside-down world and faced with increasingly disheartening realities, life clings on, as does the thirst for love.

 

This is how Vitalisme closes, the record of one’s life, the one of Nicolas Michaux, a record from life itself.