Marianne Dissard – Interview

Marianne Dissard

Marianne Dissard is a French born singer/songwriter, who spent a large part of her life living in Tucson, Arizona. She started her career as a film-maker before taking up singing, and releasing her first album in 2006.

I am making up for lost time listening to her wonderful back catalogue having been introduced to her music through her sultry re-working of Richie Valens Come on Let’s Go and the remarkable Prisencolinensinainciusol by Adrian Celentano. These were initially planned to be part of a covers album, although having now released several of her covers as singles, the album might not materialise imminently.

I was intrigued enough by Marianne to buy her book “Not Me – a memoir” and was blown away by the writing within. Both in terms of the utter honesty in her story, laying her soul open about her battles with, initially anorexia, then bulimia, but also in the beautiful, almost poetic manner of her writing. An inspirational story which led me to ask Marianne if she would be happy to be interviewed for my blog. Which I’m delighted to say she agreed to.

Not Me – a memoir

Marianne, if you don’t mind, before we talk music, I’d like to touch on your background, I thought your book “Not Me – a memoir” was a breathe of fresh air. The prose was beautiful, and your honesty about your life and how you managed eating disorders was both heartbreaking at times and refreshingly honest. Although our backgrounds are very different, and the way in which mental health impacts us also, I can empathise with a lot of situations you write about. I started blogging and writing novels to help me manage my mental health, to focus my mind on something and try to block out all the negative thoughts (although I’ve started 3 now and my lack of self confidence keeps triggering and I’ve finished none of them).  How did you feel writing the book, was it a cathartic experience?

Thanks for your kind words on my book (and music). Yes, you can say it was a cathartic experience but only in the sense that fearlessly confronting one’s demons – aiming to understand and vanquish them, or shrink them to size – can be empowering. But I get a similar sense of confidence and accomplishment from any project I not just start but, importantly, finish — mountains to climb and the view to enjoy for a very brief moment. With the book though, the sense of revelation and self-exploration (the playfulness of it as well as the inescapability of the process — I don’t like to start a creative project and not finish it —) were powerful motors over the five years it took me to get from idea to paperback.

In your book you talk about acceptance of your bulimia, and that when you have relapses, you deal with it in a pragmatic manner. I can relate to this in terms of anxiety and depression. I used to wish for a “cure” or a day I would be free of it but now I have grown to accept that it is part of who I am and can only try to deal with how it impacts me on a day in day out basis. How are you today, how do you stay in control?

An early reader of one of the many drafts responded to the writing at the time by suggesting that maybe I wasn’t over the experience itself, that I was writing from within it. And it was true. The writing and the healing went along. But it’s been over two years now since the publication of the book and I truly feel in a different place. Last year, a string of theatrical shows I had booked in the UK for my solo stage adaptation of the book were cancelled because of the pandemic. I had worked hard on booking that tour and promoting it after trialling it in East Kent in various venues during the book launch tour (a walking tour where I walked from town to town for ten days).

I was actually relieved these theatrical dates were cancelled, embracing the chance to put the book and its story behind me, to turn the page and complete the healing process by letting go of the old me in a way.  I didn’t want or need to be the figurehead for eating disorders in front of a hundred people at this point. There were other things about me I needed to explore to complete the process, I suppose. Luckily, my hand was forced by external circumstances (the pandemic) and I embraced the change of pace.

Lockdown

I found lockdown initially to be a saviour – I didn’t have to leave the house, could avoid daily awkward conversations and didn’t have to wear my daily (proverbial) mask. I know you have an Instagram account that documents life in Ramsgate, how else did you cope with lockdown, did it have an impact on your mental health, and your bulimia?

When I got back to the UK last October — I had been living in Ramsgate since 2017 —  after being ‘stuck’ in Tucson for ten months while we all figured out what this virus would mean, I understood I was going back to a place I knew well but that had drastically changed during my time away. I wanted to document that change, and the pandemic, by taking photos, daily without a fault, in the streets of Ramsgate, within the limits of the one-square mile allowed by lockdown regulations. If these were the constraints imposed on us all, I would try to make the most out of it. It’s a form of resistance.

Life as I knew it – as we knew it – had vanquished. I couldn’t tour, couldn’t go to the studio to record. I was alone. So I went out with a camera and did that daily for eight months straight. Now, I’m planning a large-scale outdoor exhibition in Ramsgate starting at the end of August, and Margate’s Turner Contemporary has selected one of my photos for their autumn exhibition. I really took to being a street photographer.

I stayed healthy during that time, a true test of my recovery as I found out that lockdown and winter in England combined to create a mental and physical state in me that felt very close to what I describe in my book. I was faced daily with the same conditions or consequences of addiction: the loneliness and mental shrinking, the low-level and permanent anxieties, the isolation, fear of others, imagined or real rejection by others manifested in distancing in shops and streets, lack of social interaction… The mind warp was real and I knew it well. I just kept taking photos, and recording music from home, the daily intense connection to my producer (in Ramsgate, two streets away, yet separated by … Covid) a true lifeline.

Rural France to Tuson, Arizona

Going right back to your younger years, you are very open about the relationship with your parents through the years in the book, and the culture shock of moving from rural France to the USA. How did that change impact you?

Mostly, the change from France to Arizona allowed me time to think about what I wanted to do, who I wanted to be, and the ability to make it happen. I was suddenly off-track, derailed from my French education when I would normally have to choose, after my ‘baccalauréat’ and without much enthusiasm, which university to go to and what to study and who ‘to be’. Biology might have been my life, I kid you not, and it’s hard – or was harder then – in France to get off tracks once you’ve chosen your career.  

But luckily I got to spend a pivotal year in the States taking in new music, a different culture, tons of films (through material access to VHS libraries of classics), and make the most of the fabled All-American ‘opportunities’. I suppose that’s exactly what my parents had in mind when we moved to the land of opportunities. Little did they know, little did I know, that I would decide after six months in the States to… be a filmmaker. I can assure you I gave no indication of wanting to do that when I was still a high school student in Southwest France.

In your book you tell about spending time in Paris as a yogini, and you are now based in Ramsgate, living on a boat. Do you feel settled there, or do you think you will get itchy feet again and feel the need to move on?

I know it’s hard to keep up with me but since I finished writing the book, I sold the boat, swore (three times) I’d never return to live in Ramsgate, spent almost a year in Tucson, sold my house there, spent time in Ramsgate, Folkestone, and Paris, came close to buying a Victorian-era house in Dover, and I am now writing to you from France, with no place I call home and suitcases of mine in five different cities.

I might eventually have gotten tired of the roaming, floating, and touring lifestyle but the pandemic has made me reconsider what I truly need to feel safe, challenged, and happy. And, within the relatively affluent and very lucky Western lifestyle I’ve enjoyed all my life, how little I really need to be happy. I live within my work at this point, and for better or worse, my friends and families are scattered around the globe. It’s a price I have to now pay for the years of unfettered touring and traveling, and, well, yes, the ‘opportunities’ I embraced.

Filmmaker to Songwriter

You didn’t start out aiming for a career in music, you were initially a filmmaker, but you mention in your memoir going to see Husker Du, keeping up with alternative music on MTV, and you also filmed a documentary about Giant Sand (Available Here), so music was always part of your life. What was the catalyst and inspiration for you to start singing and recording music yourself?

Music was always a big part of my life, as a listener and teen fan of English pop while I grew up in France. But the opportunities to make music, go to concerts, have a ‘musical lifestyle’ surrounded by practicing musicians came after I moved to Arizona. There must have been two dozen bands of any genres and styles in the high school I attended and, with kids being much more independent at an earlier age, my life there started to revolve around going to concerts and crushes on cute guitar players.

But I only got a serious lasting education in what it meant to be a working musician, a truly creative artist, when I got close to Giant Sand. I made a film about them, possibly as a way of taking in these lessons for myself. I ended up staying in Tucson after filming the documentary and, well, since there wasn’t much of a film scene in Tucson, I put all my energies into music, writing lyrics for others at first, and some years later, finally getting on a stage and recording an album, aided and abetted by the Calexico crew.

What bands/music do you currently enjoy listening to?

I’m a huge fan of Lunatraktors, the Margate-based broken folk duo that’s ripping off folk’s musty clothes to show off its fleshy wounds. Political, polemical, and very much anti-beige music. Plus they’re really entertaining and inspiring live.

Marianne Dissard – the songwriter

You have a quite exquisite and extensive back catalogue. If I was introducing your music to someone who has never heard you, how would you describe your sound?

Tough one. My Tucson jazzed-up indie desert rock (think guitar bands, power trios at the core but set in sweeping spacious soundscapes à la Calexico) is spiced with ballsy Mexican border brass and the witty sweaty ‘je-ne-sais-quoi’ and romantic storytelling of classic French chanson.

I like bold theatrical arrangements with quirky orchestration at the service of well-crafted melodies whispered or screamed suggestively or ragingly, sometimes in the French language, sometimes in a medley of other languages I’m more or less familiar with.

I like to put things together that don’t necessarily fit: an Italian composer who performs at the Milan Scala with my Tucson guitar band; a Rhymesayers hip-hop producer with a Mexican border big band; the wordy ‘chansonniers’ of my parents’ record collection with Tucson’s taciturn sounds.  

What is your favourite album from your back catalogue (and why)?

Possibly, today, ‘L’Abandon’ from 2010, my second album, because it’s not been as loved as the others and is a reservoir of great songs (maybe too many and too many ideas for one album). It’s my most riotous and exuberant one, with the energy of a live recording — I was touring a lot at the time.

And I’d say ‘Paris One Takes’ is my favourite of the City Series (albums recorded while on tour with the touring band, testimonies each to the live sets we were performing on particular tours from 2009 to 2015).

But I keep changing my mind about what is my favourite album so a few years back, I put together a Best Of compilation which is really, well, all my favourite songs but chosen and compiled by a DJ friend from Minneapolis, BK-One, who knows a thing or two about picking and sequencing songs in order to make sense and story of music.

How do you write songs – what is your creative process? Do lyrics and ideas come first or melodies?

Lyrics first. I don’t write music, or very little. I don’t play any instruments. And I suppose I get my ideas and have a similar process to just about anyone else. Sit down, write. Repeat. Edit. Get up, walk around the room.

Where do you draw most of your inspiration for your songwriting?

Things I read. Things I hear. Hear in my head. Everything and anything can become fodder at certain times, even the phone book and certainly the newspapers’ obits and the innkeeper’s quibs.

Recent Cover versions

Next up for you is an album of covers, from which you have already released several singles, you’ve really made your mark on the songs and made them your own. How did you choose the songs to cover on the album?

I’m not sure the album is going to come out anytime soon. Its best tracks have been released as singles since March 2020 and I’ve come to the conclusion it’s time to move on. There will be some unreleased tracks (Spanky and Our Gang, Richard Harris, War, etc) but that’s alright with me. I’ll save them for later, to be released in a year or five. The songs I chose and why? Some, like the Phil Ochs cover or ‘Prisencolinensinainciusol’, the Adriano Celentano cover, were my immediate responses to the political climate or events of the moment. They had, had to be recorded and released.

Others like Steely Dan’s ‘Dirty Work’ or Ritchie Valens’ ‘Come On, Let’s Go’ really clicked with me because of the emotional or physical state they describe. I could really sing those words as if they were mine at the time. Bobbie Gentry’s ‘Refractions’ or Scott Walker’s ‘Rosemary’, well, they’re just stunning songs, perfect compositions and I could not help but stare at them like a deer a car headlight.

Do you have a particular favourite song you covered for the album, what makes it your favourite?

Possibly ‘Dirty Work’ because I sound like I am really enjoying singing it. The Harry Nilsson duet with Lunatraktors is also really fun.

Who have you worked with on this album?

I started out recording in Tucson, pre-pandemic, with trusted local musicians I knew well and with whom I’d recorded and toured over the years: Naïm Amor, Connor Gallaher, Vicki Brown, Thøger Lund of Giant Sand, Marco Rosano of Orkesta Mendoza, and Matt Mitchell. But at the start of the pandemic, when it became clear that we all had to start working remotely, I reached out to a dear old friend, Ramsgate-based producer and multi-instrumentalist Raphael Mann, and little by little, song after song, we ended up spending over a year (the pandemic year!) working more and more closely together, almost exclusively in the end, on producing the album. Raphael also did all the music videos. 

We are both credited as producers on the album and have a duet together, a cover of Townes Van Zandt’s ‘If I Needed You’. I also reached out to Tom Hagerman from Devotchka in Denver, Belén Ruiz in Mexico City, and a good friend in London, sax player Terry Edwards. 

I loved Terry Edwards career spanning retrospective that came out last year, what a talent. That also reminds me I have still to review the Near Jazz Experience EP with that was released on RSD in June, a collaboration with Mark Bedford and Simon Charterton

Talking of collaborations, if you could work with any musician (alive or dead) who would it be and why?

Nina Simone. I would be happy simply bringing her coffee every day. Same with Duke Ellington. But alive…? John Parish, BK-One, The Inspector Cluzo.

What’s next?

Can we expect any live dates to support the album – now that COVID restrictions are beginning to lift?

Nope. I don’t know when I’ll be playing live again.

So what does the future hold for you? What are your plans for the rest of 2021 into 2022?

I have an outdoor, large-scale, site-specific, street photography exhibition in Ramsgate starting at the end of August. Plus a photo exhibited at the Turner Contemporary in Margate from October. I want to make a book of these winter lockdown Ramsgate street photos.

I’ve also started writing, with Raphael Mann composing, my next album of originals which I hope to record in Tucson this winter. There’s a fiction book I’m supposed to be finishing. Sigh. And maybe I should get a place to live, either buy something or rent somewhere. Kinda want to get a cat, you know, and water some plants.

I look forward to all of the fruits of your labours, and I hope you get settled somewhere with a cat and some plants to water soon. In the meantime, a massive thanks for talking to me, I wish you all the very best for the rest of 2021 and beyond.

If, like me, Marianne Dissard is “new to you”, you can catch up with her back catalogue ion her Bandcamp page HERE

More about Marianne on her website HERE

Once again, I highly recommend reading “Not Me – a memoir”