The Ballad of Charlotte Gainsbourg, 5:55

Charlotte Gainsbourg has quite a pedigree to live up to. Her father is legendary French singer/songwriter/provocateur Serge Gainsbourg; her mother is English model/actress/singer Jane Birkin (for whom the iconic Hermes Birkin Bag was made). Together, they were Paris’s patron saints of cool, beginning in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. With such lineage, it’s no wonder that Charlotte is chic, elegant, talented, and of course, très cool—yet it’s surprising to learn that she is also very shy, humble, and down-to-earth.

Born on July 21, 1971, in London, and raised in Paris, Charlotte is the only offspring of one of France’s most famous and fabulous couples. She made her film debut in 1984 starring opposite Catherine Deneuve in Paroles et Musique. That same year, she made her singing debut, in a scandalous duet with and written by her father, called “Lemon Incest.” The video featured a thirteen-year-old Charlotte, clad only in a man’s white shirt and panties, cavorting in bed with bare-chested Serge. As creepy as this sounds, the behavior was typical for her loving, doting dad—who was famous for singing sexually charged songs alongside the likes of Brigitte Bardot and Birkin (whose infamous orgasmic moans bring the couple’s classic song, “Je T’Aime, Moi Non Plus” to its climax). In 1986, Serge wrote Charlotte’s debut solo album, Charlotte Forever, and wrote, directed, and starred in its accompanying film alongside his daughter. Charlotte has since been in over thirty films, two of the most notable being 21 Grams and The Science of Sleep. She has also won two Cesars (France’s equivalent of the Oscar).

With the level of her (and her family’s) past achievements as a benchmark, it’s no wonder that it has taken her twenty years to record a follow-up album! In a Paper Magazine interview, Charlotte says that after her father’s death when she was nineteen, “I really thought I would never do anything without him, that he was the only reason why I could do something in music, and so there was no point.” She also told Fader Magazine, “I was completely conducted by him. He was like a chef d’orchestre. Every comma, every intention, he knew what he wanted. So it was like being an instrument, but the pleasure to see his pleasure was very intense.” Then, a couple of years ago, Charlotte met Air’s Nicolas Godin at a Radiohead concert in Paris, and the idea of recording a new album felt right. As she told Fader, “It was very obvious. Something was very simple in the way that everything came across.”

During her extended sabbatical, Charlotte never abandoned music entirely. She contributed vocals to a few musical projects between acting gigs, including a duet with French pop singer Etienne Daho in 2004, and a song for Badly Drawn Boy’s 2002 Have You Fed the Fish? In 2001, Madonna used an excerpt of Charlotte’s voice from her 1993 film, The Cement Garden, for the track, “What It Feels Like for a Girl.” 

Wanting to avoid inevitable comparisons of her new album, 5:55, to her father’s music, Charlotte decided to write most of the songs in English instead of French. “Although in the music, I was very proud as soon as I heard a bass that resembled one of his songs, or the violins in “The Songs that We Sing” [her first single] that are very obviously close to Initials B.B. [her father’s ode to Brigitte Bardot]. I was very happy about that. It was like small tributes that I felt good about,” she tells Paper.

Charlotte collaborated with some major talent in the music world in the making of 5:55. Air’s Jean-Benoit Dunckel and Godin created and played the music; Pulp’s Jarvis Cocker and Divine Comedy’s Neil Hannon wrote the lyrics; Beck’s father, composer David Campbell (Leonard Cohen, Michael Jackson) arranged the strings; and Nigel Godrich (Air, Beck, Radiohead) produced. The result is a soft, introspective, stark work, with pianos and strings almost overwhelming Charlotte’s delicate, whispery voice. 

The drowsy, surreal songs were written with the theme of nighttime in mind. “[It] gave us a purpose to go into dreams and all those different subjects of introspection, something a bit unreal that was all very coherent. I felt those were all very intimate subjects that I felt very close to,” she tells Paper. She continues, “And for the first time, I had to direct myself and decide what I wanted to sound like, how I wanted to sing these songs, and be really the one behind [it].”

The sharp and revealing lyrics are written in Jarvis Cocker’s distinctive storytelling style; however, Charlotte makes the songs her own by the manner in which she sings them.