Vanessa Paradis, a “burning heart” forever on the alert

First track, Cœur ardent. First notes, winds, strings. Lightness. The sound rises, intensifies, gains amplitude. It's the movement of a curtain rising, the final second of solitude, the last breath before emerging from the shadows. Finally, the voice emerges, immediately recognizable, this very particular phrasing: "Suddenly I enter the light/breathless/heart pounding..." In a few seconds, Vanessa Paradis takes possession of the space, after seven years without a new album.

To open Le Retour des beaux jours, which is due for release on October 10, Etienne Daho, who wrote and composed most of the tracks with musician Jean-Louis Piérot, imagined an apparition, like a silhouette emerging from the spotlight. "This song," he says over the phone, " came together very quickly. I wanted Vanessa to enter the album like an artist enters the stage." The singer will go on tour in March 2026. The Paris concert, scheduled for May at the Zénith, sold out just a few days after it was announced.

It was Vanessa Paradis who called on Etienne Daho for this Return . "I admire him, I respect him, I love him," she summed up on July 15, in the photo studio where the shoot for M took place and, just before, an interview scheduled to last forty-five minutes (the recording will stop at 44 minutes 53 seconds).

Three-quarters of an hour, then, to better understand one of the most famous French artists in the world, a face that has been familiar to us since the last century, a first name that resonates without a second of hesitation in the French collective unconscious, a popularity intact despite the years. Less than an hour to look back on thirty-eight years of career, eight albums, a new record, twenty films in the cinema to evoke everything, or almost. "Vanessa does not speak about her private life," the press officer clarified in writing.

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