“I have always wanted to sing in French,” singer-actor Aliocha Schneider tells Apple Music of his decision to record his third LP in his mother tongue. “I released Naked just before the first lockdown. My tour was canceled and, like a lot of people, I found myself with a lot of time on my hands, so I figured it was the perfect opportunity to work on that.” Traveling between Quebec and France for film shoots, Schneider was worried his French would sound a little phony. “I innately change the way I speak from one country to the other, so I wasn’t quite sure what the result would be when I sang,” the Paris-born, Montreal-raised artist says. For his singing, he drew on pure instinct and made some conscious choices—for the sound of the vowel A, for example, he prefers the roundness of Quebec French. “It was like having to learn a new grammar for me,” he says. But the change had an unexpected effect on his voice: “In French, my singing is more spoken, gentler. I tell more stories.” Suffused with folk and acoustic sounds, Aliocha Schneider is a patchwork of stories experienced, witnessed, or invented based on situations that affected him. Here, he talks though each of the tracks on the album. "Avant Elle" “The first snippet of text I wrote was ‘Y a rien à espérer de moi’ [‘You can’t expect anything from me’]. I was thinking of someone who has everything within their grasp but feels inadequate. Sometimes we lack confidence, and we run away. Even though it may seem absurd to reach the gates of happiness and not dare to embrace it, it’s something I’ve seen often in romantic relationships. I recently came across a quote from Romain Gary that says, ‘Faut pas avoir peur du bonheur, c’est juste un bon moment à passer’ [‘We must not be afraid of happiness, it’s just a good time to be enjoyed’], and that’s exactly what this song is all about.” "Julia" “I wrote this one in Paris. I wanted to touch on that fear you experience when you leave your youth behind. You’re scared that you’ve changed, that you’ve settled down, that you’ve renounced the ideals you had as a teenager. I transposed all of this to someone on the outside [the Julia in the title], because it was easier in a song.” "L’Océan des Amoureux" “Someone very close to me was dumped by his girlfriend, who took off to join someone else in New York. It upset me because he was really unhappy. My first version of the song was quite vehement, but I kept working on it and managed to instill a gentler and more understanding spirit. The central idea is: ‘It’s not the fact that you left that hurts, it’s the way you did it.’ For me, when relationships come to an end, it isn’t a failure, it’s simply the end of something, and it can even be quite beautiful.” "Hey Mama" “I co-wrote the album with Marc-André Gilbert. For this one, we started off with a riff but the song was ultimately created in the studio. We’re willing to try just about anything and everything to get ideas. He told me to imitate a singer—no doubt Jean Leloup or Bob Dylan, because it always ends up being one of the two—and it gave us the momentum we needed. We wanted to talk about that urge to leave in order to find yourself, that moment in life when your ties are severed, when you reach the end of one thing and you’re at the beginning of nothing. It triggers a certain nostalgia, mixed with a sense of freedom.” "Ensemble" “At first, we only had the guitar riff, which we really liked, and the refrain. I was away a lot that year filming. I’d been in Greece for over six months; I was far away from my loved ones. We were addressing a sensitive subject for me, so almost immediately I thought it was corny, but Marc-André persevered until we finally managed to find the right words, and now it’s probably my favorite song on the album.” "L’autre" “Me and my best friend Romain Dumont got funding to write a short film. It was called L’écoute and it told the story of an artist who plays his EP for his friends and it slowly dawns on them that the songs talk directly about their life. ‘L’autre,’ which I wrote for this fictional artist, talks about a love triangle where the lover wants to revert to being the main character in his story and regain his dignity. It’s rather bittersweet. The short film project was called off, so I took the liberty of finishing the track for my album.” "Suspendus" “It’s probably the one we’ve done the most versions of. I wrote it on piano, at one point there were synths, it became electro... We even did a neo-soul version. We were still trying to define the identity of the album. Until one day in the studio I picked up my guitar and, as a joke, started singing the song. Marc-André and I looked at each other and it was obvious that that was the direction we needed to take. We quickly recorded a very simple version. From that moment on, we truly embraced the more acoustic and folk side of the album.” "Paradis" “I was in Greece and I came across one of Marc-André’s [Instagram] stories where he’s in boxer shorts at his home studio playing what would become the song’s bassline. Right away, I could hear the melody in my head. I filmed myself singing it over his story and sent it to him. He came over to join me in Greece, we rented a studio and recorded it. I was filming a series called Salade grecque, and I invited my acting buddies to come to the studio and sing. You can also hear them on ‘Avant Elle.’” "Losing You" “I had an old beginning of a song in English that I didn’t feel like translating, but I wrote the second verse in French, so it became the album’s bilingual song. For the part in English, I kept the very first vocal take I did. I’d written it while shooting a film in Greece called Music. I did the demo as soon as I got back to Montreal, but there was something I couldn’t quite reproduce when it came time to actually record the song, so we kept that initial take.” "Mexico" “It’s a really old song. I’d written the lyrics for another melody, but Marc-André came up with a beat that totally suited the lyrics. We wrote the track really quickly, in one session. There’s a warmth to the percussion that greatly influenced the arrangements for the rest of the album. It seemed logical to me to put the two tracks in English last, like a little nod to the past, an epilogue.”