Q: Could you tell us a little bit more about your career as an artist? How did you start writing songs and playing guitar? How old were you?
A: Hi! At first let me thank you for this interview and for helping me to spread my music and make it known in the music business. Well, I can’t remember when I started to write songs since it was such a long time ago! I started playing guitar at the age of ten, and I guess I have started to try to make my own songs at the same time. One funny thing is that I stopped writing and singing at about 25, it seemed to me at that time that I had nothing more to say with words. So I started to focus on music and guitar playing. I did it for quite a long time, involving myself into a lot of musical experiences as a musician and a composer, and I then started to write songs and sing again at about the age of 40. I don’t know if it was because I was getting old or because I was going back to my teen’s years!!! The fact is that I didn’t stop since then….
Q: Your songs are at the crossroad of blues, jazz, rock, chanson française and poetry. How would you define your music? And who are your major influences?
A: Well as you say, my music is at the crossroad of a lot of things. I guess it sounds just like my own experience of life and music … in my musical life, I have been through many different experiences. I’ve been a folk fiddler at one time, and then I’ve been a free jazz musician, involved in musical happenings, at some other time I’ve been playing rock music with various bands, I’ve also been into a jazz sextet as a guitarist, and so on…. I guess that through every one of each of those experiences, I was just following my own sound. So, what about my influences? Well I think that some of the non- french speaking people who have written about my music did get the point in calling me the French “Leonard Cohen”; The truth is that I’ve been spending a lot of time with that guy in my ears, and still can remember the very first minute when I heard his music. And at that minute, I felt that his sound
was deeply echoing my own inner music. It’s funny to notice that it is people who do not understand my words and just get the sound of my music who catch this influence. You know that Leonard Cohen is not really what people call a bluesman, as I am not either, but I think that blues is more about emotion than about a fancy guitar playing style.
Q: You already released two albums, the first one is “Ballades de nulle part” and the second one is “rouge & blues”. You even worked on your last album with the famous “Mister Blues”, Patrick Verbeke, your friend, who popularized Blues in France. Where can we get a copy of your creations?
A: My music is produced by Adima which has a partnership with an online retailer. So even if we have dropped down physical media like CD, you can get my music from all of the major online music sellers: iTunes, virgin, fnac … And of course you can go to my website www.fabricecollette.com
Q: You registered on Music2Deal to offer some of your most beautiful songs for licensing. What do you think about Music2Deal?
A: I found very interesting the idea of connecting people from the music business. The Music2Deal’s team seems to be very motivated to run the website and to help people connecting with each other. That’s why I decided to register some of my songs. I already told people from my label that I uploaded my songs to this site and they are interested to see what happens next. Adima is a very small label which helps me to make my music known here in France. But one of the reasons why I came to Music2Deal is that we need more contacts to make music known abroad. As they are some countries like Japan, China or even the US as well as some other European countries where you get a public for French singing, it would be great if Music2Deal helped us to find any partners to promote my music out there. I also would appreciate very much if my songs would be taken into movies. As I have a lot of images in my head when I write them, it would be great to see how some other people would use my songs for their own images…
Q: It might be a final surprise to our readers, but besides being a singer/author/songwriter and the father of two daughters, you also work as the founder and CEO of an online social game company, a consultant and a professor! How are you able to handle all these activities in only one life? :)
A: Well I am not :) We started the social game company a few months ago and I already dropped my consulting activity. I am now about to drop my teaching activity as well. You know, being an artist or running a company is the same thing, it’s just about creation and bringing to reality things that didn’t exist before. For now, I am focused on two major projects, which is already a lot! First one is Humanaweb, which is the name of the company we have started, and second one is my new live music project. We spend a lot of time rehearsing and working on new arrangements to make my songs sound in a different formula that they have been written for. Two days ago, we were busy recording a video of two songs live in studio while rehearsing. We will be able to release them in a few days I think. And I guess we will start to have some gigs at the beginning of next year. All of this is very time consuming and I surely couldn’t do more :). And there are of course my daughters, but this is the story of all the parents around the world :)
Interviewed by Guillaume Mariani
The Music2Deal Blog 