Un homme

The approach

Title track of the album Un homme (Tôt Ou Tard, 2013). Fourth solo album, released five years after Bungalow !. The song gives its name to the album and serves as its backbone: piano alone, close voice, first-person text. Nominated for the 2014 Victoires de la musique. Official clip available on YouTube (VT6ESwfFKrQ).

Text structure

First-person portrait. The narrator — Albin de la Simone himself, or a very close persona — describes himself. Not his achievements or his dramas, but his way of being: his habits, his awkwardnesses, his ordinary attachments.

• First person singular, present tense — the portrait is made in real time
• No event-based narrative — no “one day it happened that…”
• Concrete, non-spectacular details: what defines a man over time, not in the instant

The title-programme is ambiguous by design: un homme — indefinite article. Not the man, not my man. One among others. The singularity of the portrait rests on the subject presenting himself as universal — or at least, representative.

The technique — portrait through stripping-back

If Le Grand Amour (2008) used the ostinato as a graphic motif of duration, Un homme goes further in the stripping-back. The piano is less repetitive, more spaced — each chord has time around it. The voice is even closer. The silences are part of the structure.

This is a charcoal-portrait technique: leave white space, do not fill everything, let the form define itself by what is not there. The stripping-back is not asceticism — it is method. An arranger who knows the possible thickness of a sound and chooses not to reach it makes a choice just as precise as if he had overloaded.

The arrangement

Acoustic piano, voice without apparent processing. A few discreet elements — a light harmonic colour at moments — but nothing that takes the track out of the solo format. Standard duration (three to four minutes), no unusual structure.

Compared to Bungalow ! five years earlier, the gesture is the same but the sound is cleaner. The production is stripped without being dry. This is not lo-fi recording: every frequency is in its place. The stripping-back is produced, not suffered.

Filiation and resonances

Within Albin de la Simone’s work: Un homme is the culmination of the second movement of the discography (2003–2008) carried to its maturity. The 2003 gesture — near-spoken voice, economical piano — arrives here at its definitive form, without change of nature but with ten additional years of sureness. It is the same line, cleaner.

French piano-voice filiation: in the landscape of French song, a few artists have worked in this sober register — Dominique A for restraint, Barbara for the voice close to the microphone. Albin de la Simone does not directly proceed from either model, but he occupies the same climatic zone.

Dual arranger-author practice: the album Un homme is released in the same period he arranges for Pierre Lapointe and works with Pomme. This simultaneity is the norm in his career, not the exception. The two practices do not compete — they inform each other. What he learns arranging for other voices feeds what he knows not to do for his own.

Reading through the constants

Constant 1 — Discretion as material: the subject of the portrait is himself — the most exposed position possible for an author. He could have made it a confession, a catharsis, a heroic self-portrait. Un homme is none of these things. It is a portrait of an ordinary person, treated with the same economy as a portrait of an unknown woman (Adèle) or a random love (Le Grand Amour). Discretion does not change according to subject — it is constitutive of the method.

Constant 2 — The piano-as-illustration: if the ostinato of Le Grand Amour drew the duration of a love, the piano of Un homme draws the outline of a human presence. The spaces between the notes function like the white in a drawing — they give form its definition. It is not what is played that carries the portrait: it is also what is not played.

If Le Grand Amour (2008) is the entry into the method, Un homme (2013) is its accomplishment. Ten years of practice, the same gesture, a surer hand. The rest of the discography does not change direction — it confirms that a gesture can be held for a long time without emptying itself.

Criticism + listening — no reliable score