The singer for children, on the road to festivals this summer, and on tour of the zeniths at the start of the school year with his childishnessreleased a youth album at the end of May.
He arrives with a Segway under his arm and an Ultra-vomit t-shirt. On full tour throughout France, with his tender, funny and poetic repertoire that has conquered children, the singer Aldebert published at the end of May The Dream Blender (Glénat youth). A children’s book, illustrated by Florent Bégu, to also listen to as a podcast.
A book intended for 7-12 year olds, born of “a desire to set off on stories that intersect the reality and daily life of a classic family, and at the same time a dimension linked to the imagination and the world of the marvelous” .
“A fascination for the fantastic”
Gaspard is 9 years old and has a fairly classic life as a little boy, between a hypochondriac dad and a fan of alpine skiing, a mother who is an “everyday adventurer” schoolteacher and a big sister who is a metal fan. Everything would be fine for Gaspard, if he didn’t have those terrible nightmares peopled with monsters. To help him, his mother entrusts him with a strange device, which contains an “ancestral magic”.
“I have a fascination with the fantastic in general, cowardly Aldebert. As a child, I saw lots of horror films. This whole culture is something that I maintain. my stories and in my songs. I find it important to build myself with that. It’s cathartic. It’s a way to exorcise fears, to talk about them”.
To feed this dream blender, Aldebert drew a lot of details from his own life and from what his children tell him. “It’s also how I work in my songs,” he says.
Songs that have enchanted a multi-generational audience for 15 years already. Aldebert has thus sold more than 750,000 albums. And wrote some big hits that became playground classics, like big sound, Super Grand mother, Push your ugly (with another toddler star, comic book heroine Deadly Adele), or Rotten Superpowers.
“We must build with childhood”
The singer, father of three, says he has “a real connection” with the world of childhood. “There are a lot of childhood values that I want to offer in my writings or in my songs. Things like enthusiasm, sincerity, authenticity, and then the imagination”. “Don’t grow up, it’s a trap”, he sings, moreover, in The Scamwith Oxmo Puccino and Youssou N’dour, on his latest album childishness 4.
“You don’t necessarily have to remain a child, but you have to build with childhood and deal with it”, underlines Aldebert, who over his childishnesshis six albums for kids, evokes many themes at the height of a child, such as To skip school – which earned him a little controversy with a police union, You can’t do anything when you’re small, They stole my nin-nin… His pleasure is to see several generations come to attend his concerts.
“My goal is to connect them, to see them in the public, together. The pitfall would be to have the parents waiting at the exit, like when we go to see Troto or paw patrol“.
It also occasionally addresses social issues, as in Double papasong interpreted in duet with Calogéro, which speaks with simplicity and delicacy of homoparenthood.
“A Metal Podcast”
Cradled as a child by Brassens, Ferré, Brel, Béart, Adamo, whom his parents listened to, Aldebert likes to mix genres. After Jean-Michel Jarre in the 1980s, he discovered metal. A great passion, returned “in force” in the forties. “The next thing I’m doing is a metal podcast,” he enthuses.
The guitar discovered “at the end of college”, opens up new horizons for him: gypsy jazz, jazz in general, the trip ‘guitar hero”. “All this music, all these colors, all these chapels, it has nourished childishness“, he summarizes.
Today he likes to mix repertoires, through very eclectic collaborations, from Marcel Amont to Peter Garett, the singer of Midnight Oil, via Anne Sylvestre or Zaz. Collaborations that are naturally necessary, once the song is written.
Tour of the Zeniths
“There are titles, which in terms of musical color, naturally invite someone. I’m thinking of later when you grow up with Maxime Le Forestier, or at Double papa with Calogéro, where in the arrangement, in the sensitivity of the title, we say to ourselves ‘ah but yes, I can hear it too well!’. With Thomas Dutronc, it was really the gypsy jazz aesthetic”.
Rare are the artists who refused. It happened with Bigflo and Oli. “We had offered them something. And it’s funny, because they already have an audience of children, but they don’t want to appear in a project labeled ‘young audience’. a question of image. Middle school students who listen to Bigflo and Oli, they don’t want to listen to children’s songs at all!”.
Projects full in the head, he dreams today to make discover the various currents of metal to the children. “There are so many genres and subgenres. There is a real world!”.
Aldebert, who plans to publish the sequel to the dream blender, also continues throughout the summer its concerts throughout France. From the start of the school year and until the end of 2023, it will pass in 50 Zéniths, including that of Paris, on November 26, 2022, that of Strasbourg on December 4, theArkea Arena in Bordeaux on February 18 and the Halle Tony Garnier in Lyon on April 8.