1.
Yoann Lemoine is a man of many talents. He is restlessly creative, and seems to effortlessly move between artistic endeavors, whether that be directing and writing treatments for music videos, performing with Lana Del Rey, making his own music as Woodkid, or, most recently, writing and directing a feature film. People who have been impressed by his majestic debut album might not realize that he directed the videos for Drake's "Take Care" and Lana Del Rey's "Born To Die," and those who loved the powerful black and white imagery of Woodkid's own "Run Boy Run" video, might not realize that he was also behind Katy Perry's "Teenage Dream" visual.
In both Lemoine's videos and his music, there is a strong focus on narrative, as well as rich, vivid imagery. In mixing the grandiose with the intimate and personal, he has created a recognizable visual aesthetic, to accompany his rich, sweeping, orchestral collection of music. As a creative who is involved in numerous artistic ventures, and who has a very singular vision for his art, Yoann Lemoine is a fascinating man to talk to.
In advance of his October tour of North America (check out the dates here), we talked to him about his love of hip-hop, his "soulmate" Lana Del Rey, and why we won't be hearing another Woodkid album for four our five years.
Buy Woodkid's excellent debut album The Golden Age from iTunes here.
You started your career as a director, how and when was the idea of Woodkid born?
I’ve always liked music, I’ve always been a musician. When I started as a director, it was great because I was experiencing something. I was trying to connect it to the music that was given to me, but at some point I was frustrated that I could not connect my own music with my own visuals. So I did a few short films where I was using my music—I would say it was the starting point of Woodkid really—and at the same time I signed to a label in France.
I found this name just randomly, but I had an idea that it would be about the wood, that it would be about something very organic because I wanted to explore that very emotional side of things, almost that folk songwriting side of music.
Then I did “Iron” on my label and I did the visuals at the same time. I had already done a few big videos in the mainstream industry, but never something that personal and big. And yeah, it worked! So then I ended up doing the whole album. I feel like a musician now, but I feel more like an artist where I try to connect these things together and make music and sound and videos together. I don’t feel like I’m a real musician now; it’s much more complex than this.
It’s not like I spend hours on my instruments and I spend hours training my voice and then I go on stage and then all I do is be on stage. I do things that are much wider than this. I spend a lot of time shooting and writing concepts, writing treatments and ideas for music videos. I see music as a color, a visual, and I always try to connect visuals with music. So I think my point-of-view would never be as precise and exhaustive as the biggest musicians or bands that you would see right now. But my vision on the connection between visuals and sound, this I’m really trying to push and in Woodkid I have found a project where I can express myself with all the tools that I have.
Did you grow up in a musical environment?
Yeah, pretty much. I mean my uncle was a music teacher, my cousin that I was very close to is a big cello player. So I’ve always been surrounded by this. My mom used to listen to a lot of classical music, my brother was playing the guitar. So it’s never been like a crazy hardcore musician family, but it’s always been here. My parents are from the art world so it’s always been around me.
There’s a huge amount of really vivid imagery in your lyrics, do you think that comes from your background in visual arts?
Yeah, of course. You know I’m trying to build Woodkid with my DNA, with what I’ve been experiencing during my life, and what I grew up with. Of course the films that I like and the work that I’ve done as a director, all these things are an inspiration and a tool that I use. And the music I was listening to, the music that I liked—all these things come together. I only build things by relying on my experience and things that define my identity, because it’s genuinely who you are.
So there’s real honesty in your art?
It’s a sense of honesty, but it’s also a sense of accepting that you can build something that is relevant and accurate and contemporary based on things that have built you in your past. It’s just a way of interpreting it that makes it modern. That’s why I take from what I see around me. The core of it is, yeah, what I’ve experienced in life. Sometimes I get to use things in my music that I would’ve never used and never thought I would use one day—experiences from my life, songs that I liked when I was younger that I think are cheesy or stupid but that for some reason just make sense.
Storytelling is obviously important to you in both your music and visual projects…
Well storytelling in a way—I’ve never wanted Woodkid to tell a specific tale or anything like that. It’s much more fragmented and complex than this. I have these feelings of themes which are still blurry in my head and that I’m trying to find out.
It’s almost like psychoanalysis, and I’m putting these things on the table together and I’m trying to assemble something. So that’s why there’s a sense of repetition sometimes, because I’m still experimenting. Sometimes I tell the same stories with different metaphors, different symbols, sometimes I go back in time or in the future and have a feeling that these together in an experimental way are connecting a story, at least a thematic story or a symbolic story that is about the transition from childhood to adulthood.
You transform from that wood to that marble. You just petrify in a way. It’s almost like some sort of cancer. And I wanted to explore that very dramatic feeling. Of course, I have a very optimistic vision on growing up and what’s ahead of me. But in that project I wanted to explore this quest for darkness in a way. But it’s not a story like a novel, it’s fragments of emotions, of memories. It’s almost like a sketch of a story somehow, a very advanced sketch but it’s like this abstraction of blocks of stories that together create this story.
Do you find it cathartic getting up on stage and performing these?
Being on stage is not the most creative thing. It is more of an accomplishment, it is more of a way to communicate and say things, and a way of transmitting. But it’s a second step to me. The first step would be really the creation. I’m creative in a way on stage in that I make the tracks evolve a little bit, but the real creation occurs when you make the songs or videos. This is the most important step, because if you don’t have the right songs or right things to say, being on stage is useless. So I’m trying to work a lot on that creation level which is making songs, making music, developing my identity and then I go on stage.
So the cathartic moment is more when I find what I have to say through my songs, when sometimes I write songs and I put them together and even I, myself, discover my story. Because I’ve been honest in everything I’ve done so far, or at least tried to be, I find that my work does draw some kind of rough portrait of me. That’s where the catharsis is.
Even if I didn’t see the movie, I was attached to the soundtrack. I would just picture my own stories on it. I would see cataclysmic things, I would see explosions, I would see horses, I would see battleships, I would see a lot of things.
You’ve said that you want people to feel like heroes, or heroic when they listen to your music. Tell me a little about that.
When I say heroes it’s more like I want people to be inspired, I want people to be inspired to create things. Cause that’s the role music had in my life and it still has. I use music as an inspiration to create. When I write treatments or screenwriting or concepts, I always write with music because music carries me and pushes me up. When I was younger, I would listen to soundtracks of films and I would already direct films in my head just by listening to the soundtracks. Even if I didn’t see the movie, I was attached to the soundtrack. I would just picture my own stories on it. I would see cataclysmic things, I would see explosions, I would see horses, I would see battleships, I would see a lot of things. It would just carry my imagination in a way. So once again it’s about doing music based on your DNA, right, so I wanted to recreate that with my music. I wanted it to be my turn to create support for a younger generation that listens to music, to actually be inspired. And I see on Tumblr, on Twitter, and social networks a lot of kids that draw and make short films out of my music. I think it’s great; that’s the main goal of my music I think.
2.
You’ve mentioned a few times the word ‘color’ in relation to your music, and I see The Golden Age as a very colorful, organic album, very lush. Yet the videos are in black and white.
First of all, I’ve always loved black and white movies, especially in France you know we have this big culture of the Nouvelle Vague. Black and white movies really means something in France. Of course, you guys have a whole different culture of that time in cinema which is another story, but in France, you have this aesthetic that’s very specific that really shocked me when I was younger.
So when we did “Iron,” it’s a very geeky moment, but we shot everybody on a green screen. We shot the video on a green screen because I wanted to include these explosions that are CGI behind the characters. I wanted the characters to be surrounded with it. But usually when you do green screen, you shoot the character on the green screen and then you isolate the character and you put it back in the new CGI environment. I could afford to do these explosions around the guys, but I couldn’t afford to recreate like whole sets and things like that!
I wanted to keep that studio feel. But if I wanted to keep that studio feel with the color, I would’ve had to remove the green in all the shots and clean all the backgrounds. And I couldn’t afford that. So the solution that I found was actually to turn the video black and white because the green backgrounds would become a gray background and I wouldn’t have to change or replace them.
So then you just carried that on in the rest of the videos?
Well, I also thought it was interesting to use that almost science-fiction, fantasy, very HD-defined world shot digitally, but then turn it black and white so it has the feeling that it comes from the past. So there iis a confusion between the past and the future. It’s always been in my work and with Woodkid—you never really know if you’re in the future or the past or if the music is from the past or future. That’s what helps me to do a project that is more about the meaning of it, the feeling of it, and the emotion of it more than its connection to a time or a moment in time. It’s more about the meaning of it.
When you’re directing music videos for other people like Lana Del Rey or Drake, how do you approach that differently?
Well, first of all I have to have a discussion about what we’re doing, which is never something I have to do in my videos. Which seems stupid, but it’s actually a big deal because there’s a good side and a bad side to this. When I work on my own videos, I don’t have to question what I’m doing, but sometimes questioning is good. When I work for other artists it just displaces me into another field of creation. I have to transpose myself into the brain of somebody else and that makes me find new territories I never would’ve expected before.
When I’m doing Woodkid, I’m an echo in my own head so it’s very hard to get out of it. So it’s all about trying to find things you never would’ve done before on your own on personal projects. That’s what I love doing, especially with Lana, who has a lot of ideas and is a very creative girl. She always has references, she knows a lot about cinema and she can reference a lot of things. So it’s always very interesting to work with her.
When I’m doing Woodkid, I’m an echo in my own head.
How did you link up with Lana originally? Did she reach out to you?
I actually found out about her even before “Video Games,” before the big buzz, and I was like “I feel like this girl has something.” So we started talking and we met in London for the first time and I was like, “You know it’s gonna be big for you, right?” And I’m not an A&R person, not that type of person, and she hadn’t signed any contract yet with Universal or anything. But sometimes I have feelings for some artists that there’s something that’s gonna happen because they instantly inspire me visually.
Today, having a very strong imagery is not necessary, but I think it’s a very good tool to be known and recognized as a singular person. So I had that feeling about Lana. We talked about doing a video and was like, “You know whenever you have something, just send it to me and I wanna do something.” So in the meantime, she had done her own video for “Video Games" that was very popular. At the same time, she was sending me a rough demo of “Born to Die,” which was a very simple stripped-down version of her singing and it was just organs in the back but it was very underproduced. And I loved the song, I loved the songwriting.
So I started writing something for "Born To Die" and as I was writing it she just started really being successful around “Video Games.” So we did the "Born To Die" video, but we had more money and options. Still, it was the beginning, so it wasn’t that big and we had to make very big with very little. Luckily I was used to that because I’d already directed my own videos, and I was used to the process of making big with a very little amount of dollars. So we did “Born to Die,” and in a matter of like six months it just blew up. Now the video’s got like 100 million views I think, which is crazy.
Would you consider making music with Lana?
We’re soulmates, we could totally like make music together. We’ve sung together. She said once on TV that I was her musical soulmate, or something like that, an angel maybe. It was really sweet, but I really mean it. I think we’re very parallel. Although she’s much bigger than me of course, and we don’t do exactly the same music, and also she’s a girl, so it’s very different. The music industry when you’re a girl is very different than when you’re a boy.
3.
I wanted to talk a bit about hip-hop and rap because you worked with Angel Haze recently and you’ve been sampled by Kendrick, Juicy J, and others. Do you feel a connection to hip-hop culture?
Yeah, I listen to a lot of U.S. rap and a lot of hip-hop in general because it’s part of my culture. One of the exit doors we had from France when I was younger, was watching MTV. My producer Guillaume [Brière] from The Shoes listens to a lot of hip-hop and produces in hip-hop too. So it’s always been a reference even when we did the album, though it doesn’t sound like hip-hop. It has like a conversion of the hip-hop beats into tribal Japanese drums, yeah, very tribal in a way. There’s a similarity to hip-hop in the way we mixed the album because I wanted something very hi-fi, very sharp—that is something we borrowed from hip-hop. So there are connections, even before Kendrick sampled my song or I did that feature with Angel Haze. It’s actually very easy to rap on my songs because there’s this big rhythm and formation in it.
There’s a sense of aggressiveness and violence in it that I think inspires the hip-hop world. I’ve been asked to produce for a few big hip-hop artists, but I haven’t had time to do it yet. But I think it would be very interesting to make my very orchestral cinematic sound collide with it. I’d have to tweak it a little bit, distort it, make it a little more urban and contemporary. That was an intention not to go there on my album, but I could totally do it. It’d be interesting to work on that.
Is there anyone who you’d like to work with? Who are you listening to in hip-hop at the moment?
Um, I’m listening to Kendrick, Kanye a lot. Right now, I’m into like very obvious references that I think are very interesting actually. I’ve been listening to some Gucci Mane, Schoolboy Q’s album a lot or the latest tracks he’s released. Schoolboy was actually on that featuring with Kendrick when they sampled my song; that’s how I discovered and heard about him for the first time.
You tweeted recently that you were working on a video for “The Golden Age,” which you said would be the final video from The Golden Age project. It wasn’t clear, but seemed like you were also saying that it might signal the end of Woodkid as a musical project?
It’s not the end—there’s been this whole thing in France because I said something in an interview saying I didn’t know what was coming next because I’m going to work on my feature film after that.
Doing a feature film is four or five years of work, maybe less I don’t know yet. So I don’t think I’m going to be able to work on an album and a feature film at the same time. If I do a feature film, I wanna focus on it. So probably my next musical project is going to be doing the soundtrack of that movie, of course, cause I’ll want to connect visuals and sounds. But what I do know is with Woodkid, I’m starting to feel that I’ve said what I had to say. I think I need the last video because there’s still an aspect I haven’t told about it really, which is childhood. So I really want to work on that and I want connect the dots a bit between the videos so maybe the fans can really understand the whole complexity of that story.
And then I don’t know what’s gonna happen with the project. The word “Woodkid” is so linked to this album, so I don’t know what’s next. Maybe I’ll do another album, maybe not. I don’t know. For now I really don’t know and that’s honest.
But what I do know is with Woodkid, I’m starting to feel that I’ve said what I had to say.
Can you tell us any more about the feature film?
I’m still actually writing it right now, I’m in the process of writing so it moves in a lot of different directions. What I know is that it is going to be—people expect me somewhere, at least my fans—which would be kind of like a studio movie or a lot about art direction, very visual, very fantasized. The thing is, I don’t wanna start with something like that, so it’s gonna be a little different of where people expect. So once again, it’s a danger zone for me. I’m going into something very stripped down, very simple, very human. But it’s all being written so I don’t wanna talk about it cause it could change.
What connection do you feel to New York and why have you decided to live here?
I love New York. The first time I came to New York was in 1999. It was the first time I took the plane ever and we had some kind of school exchange would come to New York for a few days. We took the bus, all the students, and I think we arrived through Brooklyn. We passed the Queensboro Bridge, or maybe it was the Manhattan Bridge or Williamsburg Bridge, whatever. And for the first time I saw the skyline of New York, and I was very involved in that trip. It was a very important trip for me.
For some reason, when I saw that skyline, I was like, "I’m gonna live here one day" and now I live in Brooklyn on the waterfront and I see the skyline that I saw the first time. It’s almost like I own it now, it’s like mine. There’s that feeling in New York that the city belongs to you when you live here because there’s this very strong affection to the city that you have when you’re here. I know all the flaws of New York and I know it well, though I’m French, I know everything that you’re supposed to hate about it. But the good points of it are so strong that I still love it. And I love Paris too, but I think I had to run away a little bit from it cause my situation is much different in Europe than it is in the U.S. I’m much bigger in Europe and I can fill like arenas and stuff like that, so it’s very intense there for me on the media level. It’s very intense. When I come here, especially because I live in Brooklyn, it’s very mellow there. And I like that it’s mellow and chill and you can choose the life that you want in New York. You can do the crazy party thing, you can do the crazy art world where you’re connecting and doing business all the time, you can be just a hippie in a loft far away. You can choose the life that you want.
For some reason, when I saw that skyline, I was like, 'I’m gonna live here one day’ and now I live in Brooklyn on the waterfront and I see the skyline that I saw the first time. It’s almost like I own it now, it’s like mine.
There’s a sense of running from, or escaping, something in your music and videos. Have you found something here in New York...
Yeah, it probably goes in that trajectory and that path that we all have. It’s not really about running away from something, it’s about running for something new—or at least something more.
And you see running as a victory in itself?
Yeah, it is exactly that. There’s a victory in running and moving forward and discovering new things, traveling, and changing your life. I think that there’s a victory, like a social victory, in trying to move yourself into an uncomfortable place. When I moved into the apartment I’m in for the first time, I had just released my album in France. It was getting very intense, I was doing a lot of promo and was exhausted. I was like, “You know what, I’m gonna live back in New York.” I called my agent and manager and was like, “You have to find me a flat right now." So we found this place and within a week I was on a plane and was moving into this apartment getting the keys. And when I arrived here, it was this empty apartment and it was like, “What the fuck am I doing here? What the fuck am I doing?”
It was tricky, emotionally very complicated because I had been creating this thing that I loved so much in France—this career in Europe. I had all of my friends there, I’ve built a team that I love so much there—and for some reason I was quitting what I was loving so much and running away from it. But I found out I was not running away, I was actually… challenging myself. Because this (Woodkid) was getting so successful, and positive, and powerful in Europe that it scared me because it was starting to get very comfortable and it was like I could just stay there forever and just enjoy my successful.
In France we say “me reposer sur les lauriers” which would mean just “sleep on my crown” [rest on my laurels]. And I think I needed to go into something that was dangerous for me where I had to challenge myself. And New York was a little bit part of it. So I ran away, yes, but I also ran toward something that was more challenging and it was a new challenge. Whenever you win a battle, you wanna go somewhere else, so that’s why I’m talking about victory—because it’s hard. There’s a sense of fighting when you just expose yourself to new challenges like that.
