Cyrille Aimée - à Fleur de Peau

A lot of people across the world think that they know Cyrille Aimée: the matchless interpreter of song, steeped in the jazz tradition she learned from the gypsy masters in her native France. It’s a story that has been told many times across Cyrille’s career as it took her on a magic carpet ride from France to New York, and then to New Orleans, pursuing her musical vision through the works of some of the world’s great composers of popular song.

Now she’s back with a new album and a new story to tell. À Fleur de Peau presents Cyrille in her own words, with her own original compositions presented in her own arrangements, developed in close collaboration with New York multi-instrumentalist & producer Jake Sherman - just the two of them, working up the ideas as they flowed from deep within Cyrille’s heart, making music that is the most original and personal of her career. Drawing on her Dominican heritage with its cargo of African dance rhythms and Spanish folksongs, embracing the directness and simplicity of contemporary pop forms, singing tales straight from her own life, this is Cyrille as you have never heard her before.

The album’s genesis originates far from New York or Cyrille’s adopted New Orleans home, deep within the forests of Costa Rica: an astonishing tale of a creative rebirth. “I’ve been writing forever, but this album is my real birth as a songwriter. Six years ago, I found out I was pregnant as I travelled to Costa Rica. I spent a week there, surrounded by the teeming life of the jungle, knowing I had to have an abortion when I returned home. I wrote the song ‘Inside and Out’ about this powerful, scary and difficult experience and
recorded it with Jake back in New York, but I didn’t trust myself as a songwriter back then and so the song laid dormant for years. Then when the pandemic hit, I moved to some land I had bought in Costa Rica and - to my own amazement - I designed and built a house in the jungle all by myself. It was my creative outlet, and my inspiration. The house was my baby and I found myself writing again, gaining confidence as I built and wrote. Back in New York I took my new songs to Jake and told him we need to finish what we started.”

Cyrille and Sherman quickly found a working method to bring the songs to life. At the heart of each recording is a live performance by Cyrille, accompanying herself with voice and guitar or baritone ukulele: then together they would add layers of arrangement, using Cyrille’s trademark vocal improvisations to suggest horn lines, percussion parts and counter melodies which Sherman would re-create on his array of vintage instruments. The results are uniformly appealing in their direct honesty but diverse in their sound. ‘Again Again’ preserves the simplicity of Cyrille’s sad guitar ballad, with subtle production hinting at bigger things; ‘Beautiful Way’ presents a bilingual paean to New Orleans with creative percussions made by Cyrille biting down a cracker; ‘Back to You’ captures the nostalgia of separation with a Nu-Soul inflection; and Isley Brother’s cover of ‘For the Love of You’ is an unabashed, gloriously uplifting slice of sophisticated Yacht-Pop. And there’s still room for the children’s choir on the pure grooving positivity of ‘Here’ as it makes a claim for us to stay in the unmediated present, for the reimagined French chanson of ‘Ma Préférence’, for the fragile waltz-ballad of ‘Feel What I Feel’, and for the hushed, sun-drenched Spanish-language ‘Historia De Amor’, closing the album with a simple, two-chord love song dedicated to nature.