When music and visual arts come together in a delightful, graceful way – you simply must love it! As we do the new song from Mademoiselle Karen – “Je Suis Rentrée à la Maison” – accompanied by a music video featuring beautiful and creative artworks by Marie Priem. We’re happy to premiere it today for your viewing and listening pleasure!
Mademoiselle Karen is the name of a project with leader and singer Karen Duelund Guastavino (Polish audience can recognize her from collaborations with Czesław Śpiewa). Karen is a Danish vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, expressing the music through signing in different languages, mostly in French, but also in Danish, Polish and English. Stylistically, the project she leads combines jazz, cabaret, film music and hip-hop. At the moment, works with the Polish label Mystic Production on their third album. Check out the interview we did with Mademoiselle Karen a few years ago to find out more about their work.
The new single “Je Suis Rentrée à la Maison” (produced by Troels Drasbeck) is the first piece of new music since the 2014 album “Comme les Garcons“. “Je Suis Rentrée à la Maison” (eng. I Came Back Home) is a joyful song, perfectly in sync with spring coming to life. The upbeat melody has it’s twists and becomes slightly mysterious and teasing at times. It reminds me of a smell of freshly picked flowers in a vase at home. Using simplicity and giving the tunes some space and air in between, Mademoiselle Karen gives them a special power to resonate and to bloom within the song. The sound of the accordion (played by Martin Bennebo) is like a musical tightrope walker, using the song as his line to make tricks on. However, when you go through the lyrics, you find a serious message behind vivid arrangement and vocal parts.
“It is a song about letting yourself find comfort in the home with your loved ones, while the world outside falls apart. You don’t know what will happen outside the home, but you know that at least you are together in this, and you will protect each other,” explains Mademoiselle Karen.
In the creative music video, we see artworks by Marie Priem. It is a mix of collage and drawing, with French, English, Polish, and Danish words displayed on – right in the spirit of Mademoiselle Karen. Coming home during a hard time provides relief. Especially nowadays we should be grateful to have a home where we can find peace. Mademoiselle Karen reminds us how fragile our sense of security is and how vulnerable people truly are.
“The song is about our time at the moment with lots of crisis – climate, refugees or now coronavirus. There are lots of concerns, and we stay isolated in our homes to protect each other. The home is our new world protected from the world’s misery outside,” adds the artist.
This new song and music video from Mademoiselle Karen are just one more reminder of how we all truly need art in our lives, maybe now more and ever. As art creates a safe space – an inner home to come back to – within ourselves.