Just this past week, French musician Emma Bergmann dropped her latest single, ‘Tonnerre sous les tropiques,’ which in English translates to Tropic Thunder, and she shared with us a colorful music video to go with it. According to Emma, this song captures the rollercoaster feeling of leaving someone you are still in love with, a feeling that many of us can certainly relate to— I certainly can. Emma also addresses addiction, grief, and the artificial paradises we sometimes immerse ourselves into to cope with our feelings, which ultimately distance us from healthy relationships.
In the music video, conceived and directed by Emma, she collaborates with the artist Ellektro, who creates colorful digital sets to depict life continuing without her, a life from which she dissociates in the face of the omnipresent memory of the person she left, who occupies her thoughts endlessly. Edited alongside his DOP and videographer Spike Gonzo and with the help of the talented 2xvroom on FX, they together create a world riddled with glitches and bugs that reference inner chaos and offer a universe unlike any other.
While communicating with Emma over the release of our interview together, she provided me with this fun fact (or so at least that’s how she referred to it as): “The studio I was supposed to shoot at for free got flooded the day before, and the night before at four in the morning the initial DOP dropped the project and took the light director along with him, so texted Spike who is a longtime friend (he was partying at the time and he came to the rescue the next day. I posted an ad to find a light crew on Instagram and Garance Audrain who was a fan of my music answered my desperate call for help. We shot everything in my living room so this is somewhat of a miracle.” Guess everything really does happen for a reason.
Read more about Emma’s creative process and journey in our chat at L’Hôtel Grand Amour and watch the music video for ‘Tonnerre sous les tropiques’ here.
So it’s been over three years since your last release right? And that was your first?
Emma: Yeah, it was my first.
And now you’re working on a new project, and that’s coming out this year?
Emma: Yeah, absolutely.
How does that feel different from your last album?
Emma: In every single way. Basically, my last album was R&B, but only because I hadn’t really
found myself. And the guy I used to work with who, stole my songs, basically… yeah. He put them in his name. I had to start from scratch and because he sent my works to labels right away when I asked him not to, I basically signed with the first label that wanted to sign me. And to please them in a way, because I didn’t feel really legitimate at the time an because I was really insecure, I thought that I had to do something that they would expect me to at the time. So because the guy completely changed my music from folk to R&B, and it became sort of R&B. So when he left, I was like, yeah, I can do that. Basically I went through all that and I started from scratch in a very short amount of time.
So I did some songs… it’s still me writing them and stuff like that, but it’s not as authentic as it is now. I used to sing in English, which I think puts a distance with your thoughts and stuff like that because I’m not American or English or anything like that. COVID came and I thought I was going to write one song a day in French because the French language is pretty tough.
I’ve heard that a lot from French musicians. I have been told you almost have to be a poet to write in French. Especially if you’re making very American centric sounding music too because it is what you have become accustomed to.
Emma: So I wrote terrible songs, but it was fine. Cause that was the whole point, not to judge myself. I was like, this really sucks. I’ll try again tomorrow. And it became kind of good. Then it became really good. So I thought, yeah, it’s funny. Cause like my voice doesn’t sound the same in French
and it’s really exciting. And people around me got excited too. Now I am like, I think maybe this is what
I want to do. But also I think I want to leave my label because tons of decisions I wanted to make, I wasn’t listened to at all. I felt like I had gut feelings that I shut out and I shouldn’t have. So now
if I want, if I make mistakes, I want them to be my own. And if things don’t work out, I want it to be my fault and not something where I’m like, I told you so. I want to have like full responsibility, but I guess I didn’t know how much responsibility that it was. It was a lot and it is a lot, but also I feel like pretty free and that’s kind of nice. It’s just that it’s a lot of work.
Especially, social media was not the same at the time. So I have to do five people’s work, maybe more sometimes, just to make people listen to my music. So it is tough, but I kind of love it too.
So what aspects of the music process are you involved in? You write your own lyrics, right. Do you have collaborators?
Emma: I have tons of collaborators. I sing, I write the lyrics and I write the melodies that I sing. And sometimes I write the melodies that are played, but I don’t produce at all. So I work with producers. I’m working with like a lot of guys actually, but they restored my trust in men in the music industry. I’m sure that some guys can like destroy it later on (laughs), but they restored it. So that was nice.
That takes a lot of trust for sure.
Emma: It did. It was a long process and I kind of had to be friends with them first and get to know them and also have validation from other girlfriends who work with them. I feel like music writing is also so vulnerable, it comes down to having trust with these people and helping them. Trusting them to be able to like execute your vision because as in your prior experience, your vision was not heard at all. Now it’s only guys who are never questioning my feelings and what I hear ever. That’s a really nice feeling actually. And it’s really delicate and it’s really, really precious to me.
Of course. So where are the hardships now in this new era you are in?
Emma: When you’re independent and you don’t pay people you work with, things can take ages and you can’t be like, ‘dude, hurry up.’ You’re like… okay, I’ll just kind of wait until it’s my turn. Still, I think it’s kind of nice also. It’s really hard to be patient, but it’s also kind of a learning curve in the days we live in. I have to learn to be patient because otherwise I’ll just become a bitch.
Do you find that your vision then changes because of the time that’s passed? Maybe how you felt three months ago is maybe not what you think about a certain song or project perhaps?
Emma: What I choose to keep is the ones that I still think the same. Like if after six months of waiting, these are still the ones then for sure they are. These are the songs that I chose to put in my EP basically.
Click here to stream ‘Tonnerre sous les tropiques’ on all platforms.