Jeanne Cherhal

City of Lens presents: Jeanne Cherhal

Jeanne is an album that lets space, air, and light in. A record bearing the author’s name. Like a portrait in thirteen tracks that celebrates her freedom. Jeanne is an album that Jeanne Cherhal, as usual, has nurtured to maturity. Since L’An 40, in 2019, she has explored other territories: that of literature with À cinq ans, je suis devenue terre-à-terre, a collection of her favorite words, and that of cinema with the “Cinéma” concerts, piano-and-voice renditions of classics from film scores, which gave rise to an international tour. Jeanne Cherhal will present this album on the Colisée Lens stage on November 26, 2026 at 7:00 p.m.

Then one evening, the first breath of Jeanne was born from a conversation with Benjamin Biolay, a longtime collaborator, who proposed to produce her new songs. These emerged almost spontaneously at the piano, growing through the intuitions of one and the encouragements of the other. They then take shape during the recording overseen by Marc Portheau at Studio de la Seine in Paris and at the Manoir de Léon, in the Landes, with Philippe Entressangle (drums), Pierre Jaconelli (guitars, bass, artistic collaboration), Johan Dalgaard (additional keyboards), and a string quartet.

Jeanne is the seventh album by its author, but the first she releases independently. An opportunity to master the entirety of its conception, to discover the captain’s shoulders in herself, and to love it. Jeanne is an album created in a creative fever, a surge of joy, to the point that almost all melodies come from the first vocal takes. A supple, unfolding timbre, which pairs with the deployment of a marked sensuality.

In Rodrigues or Sahara, it is the matte texture of the drums, a Rhodes with blurred outlines, or the grace of the violins, which render tangible sensations such as the taste of honey and the scent of wind, the softness of sand flowing slowly. But also tribal drums, languid choirs, and the “good vibrations” of a Hitachi Magic Wand, a brazen ode to solitary and feminine pleasure.

Always, in Jeanne Cherhal’s music, feminism and poetry go hand in hand. Like La Maman et la putain, two faces of a single woman who walks with a sinuous, serene gait. In La Marée, echoing the dozen times per year of her beginnings, Jeanne speaks with calmness, for herself and for all, of time passing and life flowing by. Even if shadows have sometimes darkened it (on the necessary and discreet La vie est trop courte, lit by brass), that violence has left its mark (Sous les toits), and that Le cri des loups has too often echoed, a liberating title that pins the snout of wild beasts with humor, and whose seventies groove seems to invite dancing to trample them.

In Jeanne, there is also the question of a beast that is not a threat (on the gentle doo-wop of Foutue), of a love that feeds on both daily life (Grande est ma chance) and fantasies. On Jean, the fan of an actor is no longer the sad groupie of the pianist, and she embraces her crush with a burst of strings and laughter. In Jeanne’s world, romance is not dead: it is sung loud, liberated and strong. In evidence is Faut plus qu’on se revoie, which, with Benjamin Biolay, resumes the thread of a story thought finished fifteen years ago, with the final chords of Brandt Rhapsody. A song of old lovers written, like its first act, in the euphoria of a moment. A track that dares to believe in the passion that takes you by surprise again, one summer evening, at a rekindling that only a breath of air and freedom can revive.