8/9/2019 Charlotte Gainsbourg LA Weekly 12910

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8/9/2019 Charlotte Gainsbourg LA Weekly 12910

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( 56 )  LA Weekly  /  January 29-February 4 2010  /  laweekly.com |

Trepanation, as the procedure

is called, is an ancient medical

maneuver that’s been chroni-

cled in 16th-century German

engravings and found in

unearthed skulls dating back to prehistoric

France. Medieval doctors believed trepana-

tion — drilling a hole in a living person’s skull

— was a way to get demons out, and early20th–century neurologists prescribed it as a

cure for mania.

In 2007, the very nonmanic French singer-actor Charlotte Gainsbourg sustained a headinjury while waterskiing. Persistent head-aches prompted her return to the doctors,who, after conducting neurological tests andan MRI, discovered a massive brain hemor-rhage that was caused by the accident. Theprognosis was serious, Gainsbourg explains:Blood clots, and a small hematoma, hadgathered around her brain, “like the one [ late

actress] Natasha Richardson had,” threaten-ing her life. To save her, the doctors drilled asmall hole into her skull in order to release theblood.

The procedure worked, and in copingwith the shock of it all, the singer learnedthat maybe those medieval doctors were onto something. “[My realization] wasn’t thatdramatic as the surgery itself,” she qualifies,“but I was very, very close to death. I thoughtI was very courageous toward life and death,and I didn’t really care, but when it happened,I realized how scared I was.”

A native French speaker, in English, Gains-bourg saunters through sentences, tiptoeingfrom word to word like she’s crossing a creekone stone at a time. Twenty years passedbetween the creation of her first and secondalbums, and she rarely performs live. Butthen, she’s never had to make music in orderto eat. During those two decades she wasbusy becoming an A-list celebrity in Francewhere, as the daughter of beloved late croonerand mischief-maker Serge Gainsbourg andFrench actor/chanteuse Jane Birkin, she hasbeen in the spotlight for much of her life.She’s steered that good fortune in fascinat-

ing directions. As an actor she’s worked witha long list of esteemed directors: MichelGondry, Alejandro González Iñárritu, ToddHaynes and Lars von Trier. “I’m not an artist,”she protests. “I’m not even a musician. I canplay the piano, but I’m not that good, anyway.”

Still, while getting her MRI and lying inthe tube, Gainsbourg started to think aboutsongs. “When I was inside that machine,” she

says, “it was an escape to think about music.It’s rhythm. It was very chaotic.”

She stored the memory away, and aftershe recovered, serendipity put her in thepath of Beck Hansen, whom she met at aWhite Stripes concert in L.A. She and thesinger-songwriter had a brief conversation,initiated by their common bond, producerNigel Godrich (Radiohead, U2, R.E.M.), whohad worked on Gainsbourg’s 2006 return tomusic, 5:55, and three of Beck’s most critically

acclaimed records, including Sea Change.Gainsbourg and Beck met again, backstage ata Radiohead show in Paris, which promptedher to explore the possibility of making a newrecord. She called Beck and was soon work-ing with him in his Silver Lake home studio.Casually, the two began to record, minus anyconcrete expectations.

“It wasn’t planned that we’d do a wholealbum together,” she explains, “but Beck wasinspired by my accident.”

He worked the instrumentation and co-wrote the lyrics, and Gainsbourg providedthe inspiration by explaining what she’d

experienced in the hospital. “Take my eyesand paint my bones/Drill my brain all full of holes,” she breathily whispers on “Master’sHands” over Beck’s lurching guitar rhythms,producing what would become the first trackon IRM (or imagerie par résonance magné-tique, the French translation of MRI).

In the same session, they recorded “In theEnd,” a stripped-down acoustic ballad thatlayers Gainsbourg’s wafting hums and smokyvocals over glockenspiel and strings arrangedby Beck’s father, David Campbell. But thesound, as with many of IRM ’s string pieces,

faintly resembles the sensual, warm stringsections of Gainsbourg’s father’s. (Beck, infact, sampled Serge’s “Cargo Culte” on histrack “Paper Tiger,” on Sea Change.) “I thinkthey use strings in an entirely dierent way,”

she says of her father’s propensity to use ar-rangements as a punctuation, as opposed tothe Beck family’s more atmospheric runs.

Finally, Gainsbourg and Beck piecedtogether “Heaven Can Wait,” a poppy piano-driven stomp that would become IRM ’s firstsingle. (Its bizarre, wonderful companionvideo is by Los Angeles director KeithSchofield.) When these initial songs werecomplete, Gainsbourg and Beck parted; heneeded to finish his own album and she wasworking on film projects, most notably hershocking, award-winning performance in Lars

von Trier’s Antichrist .As she let those initial sessions breathe, thesinger decided she wanted more and askedBeck if he’d do the whole album. The phonecall didn’t surprise the musician. He’d beencontinuing to write music with Gainsbourgin mind, and in the next 18 months, they builtIRM ’s stylistically disparate but impossiblycohesive vision. So she returned to SilverLake.

“[Beck] wakes up with a new idea everyday,” she says. “Beck wrote all the music andmost of the lyrics, but I was reacting to whathe was doing. I could have continued forever,

but we stopped when the album made sense.”The function of IRM , like that of the ma-

chine that inspired it, was to penetrate herhead, Gainsbourg explains. “It was a chanceto look at memory and looking into the brainin a more abstract, more poetic way.”

The album avoids the kitschiness of Beck’sgenre chop jobs and funky electro-soul break-downs but maintains his style throughout.

Like the best producers, he helps Gainsbourgto speak for herself.

“My creativity comes out with others,”

she acknowledges. “That’s why it is such apleasure to be involved with Beck. I can’t doanything on my own. I like the idea of enter-ing someone else’s world. I find more freedominside someone else’s work rather than beingcompletely free, and able to create anything.”

Yet, with the album complete, Gainsbourgfaces a new obstacle: her first-ever Americantour. Since that first time she sang with her fa-ther 26 years ago, on the notorious hit single“Lemon Incest,” she has rarely performed live.She says her father and mother, actress and“Je t’aime ... moi non plus” singer Birkin, onlyperformed after many years of commercial

success. “My mother was my age when shewent onstage,” she says. “She had about 10albums by then. Even then, I saw her terrifiedbackstage.

“It’s very disturbing, in a way, to put your-self out there. One side of me wants to bedaring and wants to do it, and to be able to doit. Another part says, ‘You don’t know how todo anything.’ ”

WHILE GETTING ANMRI AND LYING INTHE TUBE, GAINS-BOURG STARTED TOTHINK ABOUTMUSIC. “WHEN IWAS INSIDE THAT

MACHINE,” SHESAYS, “IT WAS ANESCAPE TO THINKABOUT MUSIC.

CHARLOTTE GAINSBOURG’S 

 SKULL SESSIONS  A FRENCH CHANTEUSE/ACTOR’S METHOD OF COPING WITH  NEAR DEATH: ENLIST BECK TO DELVE INSIDE HER HEAD

 BY DREW TEWKSBURY 

LAmusic

Luckily, the holes in Charlotte Gainsbourg’shead aren’t anywhere you can see.