It starts with a beating heart. A familiar pulse, the very rhythm of life. This heart is that of Clara Luciani. Which gives its title to his second album and, in a world shut down due to a pandemic, has never slowed down. March2020, like all of us, Clara is stopped in her tracks by confinement. A forced break for the one who, since the release of her first album, Sainte-Victoire, certified triple platinum (300,000 albums sold), has never stopped. Rewarded with two Victoires de la Musique, Clara Luciani has performed more than 200 concerts, from intimate guitar-vocals to numerous high-energy Olympias.

Time has frozen; so Clara sets herself, as a challenge, to make a record more lively than ever. To dress up the songs she composed alone on guitar during her tour, Clara brings together around her, Sage (Woodkid, Revolver), his accomplice on Sainte-Victoire, Pierrick Devin (Phoenix, Lomepal), Yuksek as well as his friends, whose laughter and hand claps can be heard. But also to Breakbot, beat magician with whom she shares a love of disco, French touch, cascades of strings and fast basses, inspired by both Abbaque and those of Arcade Fire. If Clara's first love remains rocket singing, she knows, despite her youth, everything that French variety, from Françoise Hardy to Michel Berger, can have that is noble and elegant. That with her, we can dance to sad songs, moving to melodies beautiful to cry and how above all it has the power to bring us together. This is how Cœur was conceived: a hymn to joy, a breath of freedom, an outstretched hand.

The world has stopped, but not those who inhabit it. And it’s everything that binds us that Cœur celebrates, a word that recurs in every song on the album. A great lover, Clara recounts the passion that devours on AmourToujours, these ballads that we listen to together on Sad and slow, in a duet with Julien Doré, the friendship on Tout le monde, which rightly says how much those we love are sublime in our eyes. But also, what we keep forever of the place from which we come, this South that Clara sings in La Place, and whose sun lights up the video for Le Reste: a title which draws a line under a past story, but nevertheless cherishes, with a smile, only the best memories. Get up, face together, refuse violence: after Grenada, Clara Luciani continues to forcefully defend what drives the women of her time, and reminds, from the first minutes of the record, that “love only hits the heart . » A heart that also sometimes beats in silence: I don't know how to please gives a voice, on a simple guitar, to the fragile, the shy, to those who, in the shadows, do not know how to seduce. And Au Revoir, covered in a mist of synths, says how Claraa fears saying goodbye to her job, of seeing the theaters close forever. A title, written as if to ward off fate.

Before starting to laugh again, to sing, to live and to dance: it is the burst of Breathe Again, the hope that remains anchored to the body. A breath of life. A heart that beats endlessly.

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