Until the end of the year, Benjamin Biolay takes his latest album on stage, the double Disque Bleu, born from two years around the world, from Rio to Paris, from Sète to Buenos Aires. Meeting with a protean artist who has forgotten nothing of his dreams.
Twenty-five years after his sensational debut, the dust settles and his portrait emerges, beyond the pretenses, of his image of a nonchalant dandy, of his outbursts, of his loves on glossy paper. What remains is the elegance, depth, perseverance and poetry that illuminate his Blue Disc. Blue like the sea, like the sky seen from a plane, planes which, like him, crisscross the world, from France to Brazil or Argentina, where Benjamin Biolay lives part of the year. This album in two parts with subtitles Résidents Then Visitorsits true identity, thus represents a planet where it becomes complicated to feel at home: “These political subtexts reflect my anger at the rise of racism, in France as elsewhere. Born long after the war, my generation still bore the scars of it, with a pressing need for it not to happen again. But people forgot. In the United States, ICE, which is nothing more than a fascist militia in a pseudo-democracy, has nothing to envy of what happened during the Yellow Vests. Apart from the fact that they don’t shoot people in the head with weapons of war, we’re not far from it anyway. It is the culmination of an atrocious rise in fascism. In Argentina, President Milei has fans, but many hate him to an unimaginable extent. People argue a lot in family, among themselves: it creates a pretty crazy kind of discord, similar to Trumpism.â€
Benjamin Biolay’s music is located at the opposite end of discord, a refuge perhaps to find a form of beauty: “It’s a quest. The rage is no less strong deep inside me, when I make songs, but I am no longer a citizen, I am me. I am a savage.†Author, composer, musician, producer, actor and for the first time this year, director of a documentary on the songs of Georges Brassens, in two years he created his double album, 24 songs in an hour and a half on a sumptuous 33-rpm record, a fantasy object imagined by the artists M/M.
“The rage is no less strong, when I make songs, but I am no longer a citizen, I am me. I am a savage”
This story unfolds like a film on several continents: “I often start from a memory. It’s not smooth, it’s not simple. When you have to transform the music into a scenario, it’s a bit like the moment of great struggles where you fight with yourself.†He puts a lot of humor in there and makes fun, for example in the title Bad Boyof everything that was stuck on his back: “Yes, I don’t care and I don’t care. Well, more precisely, I don’t care, but it hasn’t reached my soul. When I sing ‘half soldier, half monk’, it’s neither. The principle is not knowing exactly where we are going or under what conditions. What makes me still want to write songs is to probe inside myself. The composition is more mysterious, the music is close to a dream. Sometimes, I come out of ten days in the studio, without knowing how it happened. There is a slightly magical side, as if we had dreamed the recording.â€
In Month Flightsone of the musician’s favorite books, Jean Mermoz writes: “Modern life allows travel, but does not provide adventure.†Biolay, for his part, attempted a creative adventure by writing the Residents in France section and the Visitors to South America section. The air mail that he admires so much has nourished this album in depth: “I have a very intimate link with Saint-Exupéry. I was in the same high school as him, and I got kicked out like him. Being a bit of an Argentinian citizen, I come across the names of these pioneers on every street corner. In Buenos Aires, they are very present. People are still grateful for the window they opened to the rest of the world, crossing the impossible and colossal Andes mountain range, at the risk of many lives. The Mermoz, Saint-Ex, Guillaumet were complete madmen, fakirs.â€
His way of throwing himself into the void: the stage. His Disque Bleu, which comes to life in the form of acoustic recitals then electric concerts this summer and until the end of 2026, also pays homage to Brazilian music – he recorded it partly in Rio: “Over there, I was amazed to see so many music everywhere. A way of life. Between the baile funk that comes at night from the favelas, the bossanova musicians, or samba in the bars or the percussion of the batucadas, it never stops.â€
Find the full article in the new issue of TIME France, available on newsstands.
